Re: tiny problems

From: Lars Thomas Hansen <lth_at_denali.ccs.neu.edu>
Date: Sat, 03 Aug 96 14:07:49 -0400

>Has anyone done any profiling? Some of the STk examples
>are slow in places. I'm wondering if it's Tk, Scheme,
>or, probably, both.

Performance-wise, the Scheme part of STk is a dog; my rule of thumb is a
factor of 100 slower than native code on programs that do a lot of
procedure calls and integer arithmetic (standard stupid benchmark to
substantiate this is the doubly recursive Fibonnaci function). There
are many reasons for STk's relative slowness, some of them are even good
(simplicity, portability), and although several parts of the interpreter
can probably be made faster, I'm not sure that it is a particularly good
idea to do so: if you want truly good performance, you're pretty much
required to go with a native-code system anyway. If this is what you
need, MIT Scheme 7.4.2 (for Win32 only) is rumored to have Tk support.
You should also be able to make something work with Scheme->C, but it'd
be a bit of work.

--lars
Received on Sat Aug 03 1996 - 20:10:00 CEST