Re: [Chicken-users] help please

[Bruce Hoult]

On Tue, 2004-04-13 at 23:21, felix wrote:
> > - the new script takes 10 secs to run
> > - the old script took 6 min to run
> > - the Perl script took 5-6 secs to run
> 
> Hey, 10 secs vs. 5 secs is actually pretty good!

Yep, that's excellent.  I'm impressed.  I wonder how it goes with the
new(ish) option to use PCRE as the Chicken regexp engine?


> > I guess Perl's IO is much more efficient than chicken's IO
> 
> Indeed, there are worlds between them. But that is to be expected,
> since Perl is an I/O and regexp engine.
> 
> Chicken will never be in the same ballpark as Perl for these kind of
> things.

Perl is good, but it's not unbeatable.  I've managed to tune bits of
Gwydion Dylan (IO and hash tables, mostly) to get very close to (or even
beat) Perl for many of the "challenge" snippets that float around the
net from time to time.  And that's despite the *far* higher generality
of Dylan's I/O system and collection classes.

There a regexp implementation for CL (CL-PCRE) that compiles regexps to
linked closures and claims to be twice as fast as Perl.  I wonder how
hard that would be to port to Scheme (or Dylan)?

-- 
Bruce Hoult <address@hidden>