Path: news.daimi.aau.dk!jacobse From: jacobse@daimi.aau.dk (Jacob Seligmann) Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta,comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Comparison: Beta - Lisp Date: 16 Sep 1994 11:01:19 GMT Organization: DAIMI, Computer Science Dept. at Aarhus University Lines: 50 Message-ID: <35bttv$3mu@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> References: <34n2qe$d74@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <34pfea$6ee@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> <354q47$60i@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> NNTP-Posting-Host: clematis.daimi.aau.dk Xref: news.daimi.aau.dk comp.lang.beta:58 comp.lang.lisp:13308 Matthew McDonald (mafm@cs.uwa.edu.au) wrote: > What Jacob's saying is > (a) Typical code written in c performs more than 5 times > better than code in his favourite language using available > implementations, and > (b) there's no reason why his favourite language couldn't be > implemented so it was competive. Again, I was merely answering to an earlier post which was misinterpreted as saying that BETA was *inherently* 25 times or more slower than C. I did so by using the original C program containing tight loops with lots of pointer arithmetic to write an equivalent BETA program which was "only" 5 times slower (thereby trying to show that the factor or 25 was much too pessimistic), and finally explained the difference in the code produced (thereby trying to show that the slowdown was not a product of the language design, only its current implementation). > What lisp (and beta) advocates seem to often ignore is that quality of > code generation really matters to most people. > > Telling people that a factor of 5 difference in run-time doesn't > really matter doesn't encourage them to use your language. Neither > does telling them that *in principle* or *some day in the future*, > your language could be competitive. We at Mjolner Informatics take the quality of the produced code *extremely* seriously. There is no reason why we should not be able to produce code comparable to C for the imperative portions of the language, and we're constantly working on it. Meanwhile, it is our practical experience that for real applications (not dhrystone-type benchmarks) the quality of the code currently produced is more than acceptable. Also, BETA provides an easy interface to C; if 5% of your code is time-critical, you can therefore still write it in your favorite procedural, optimized language, and use BETA's modelling features and extensive libraries for the remaining 95%. Cheers, /Jacob Seligmann ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mjolner Informatics ApS Phone: (+45) 86 20 20 00 ext. 2754 Science Park Aarhus Direct: (+45) 86 20 20 11 - 2754 Gustav Wieds Vej 10 Fax: (+45) 86 20 12 22 DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark Email: jacobse@mjolner.dk ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BETA is better ------------------------------------------------------------------------