Thanks for summarising all these info for S7 branch and for the benchmarks. It’s indeed quite strange seeing s7 being so slow in LaTeX export.
I haven't seen such an extreme case myself, but I do see more memory
usage. For example, after loading the user manual (Help -> Full manuals
-> User manual) in a newly started TeXmacs, I get 681.2MB in s7 versus
518.1MB in guile-1.8 and 453.5MB in guile-3.0.
I’m not sure if this is platform independent as I’m experiencing this excessive memory usage on Mac mostly (I am seeing it right now :)) I’m still unable to pinpoint the culprit (if you cannot see the screenshot, it’s showing 1.40GB of memory usage from a S7-Qt5 TeXmacs, which I’m only editing 2 documents with max of 3 page). A command of “(*s7* 'memory-usage)” shows: 'approximate-s7-size (1075247278 . "1.1G”), with 'heap-size (16384000 1048576000 . "1.0G”). Maybe it is exclusive to my branch though :) It would be interesting to see what other Mac users experience (on my branch or other branches). Note that the segment fault described here doesn’t occur with optimisation flags enable on Mac, but it does crash TeXmacs on Linux/Windows 10.
I’m still trying to figure out how to trace memory allocation for S7.
On another note, as Scheme is a dynamic language, there should be a lot more functions that won’t work (hidden somewhere) and until we use them, we won’t notice them. Maybe we could consider writing some tests code in Scheme (enumerate over all the important functions for instance) to make our lives easier when switching Scheme implementations (I can see this happens in the future, for either performance or system compatibility).
Best regards,
Joy