Path: news.daimi.aau.dk!news.uni-c.dk!sunic!ugle.unit.no!nac.no!eunet.no!nuug!EU.net!uunet!gater3.sematech.org!pulitzer.eng.sematech.org!usenet From: "William D. Gooch" Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta,comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Comparison: Beta - Lisp Date: Fri, 16 Sep 1994 09:03:35 -0500 (CDT) Organization: SEMATECH, Austin Lines: 29 Message-ID: References: <34n2qe$d74@nz12.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de> <34pfea$6ee@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> <354q47$60i@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> NNTP-Posting-Host: swim5.eng.sematech.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII In-Reply-To: Xref: news.daimi.aau.dk comp.lang.beta:61 comp.lang.lisp:13310 On 16 Sep 1994, Matthew McDonald wrote: > (a) Typical code written in c performs more than 5 times > better than code in his favourite language using available > implementations, and This is exactly the sort of unsupportable generalization I was afraid would result from the net publication of this so-called "benchmark." (Not a reference to Jacob's post, but to the original.) Differences in performance do not boil down to single numbers, nor any kind of simple comparison for that matter. >.... Telling people that a factor of 5 difference in run-time doesn't > really matter doesn't encourage them to use your language. Most of the time, a factor of five is negligible. In critical parts of the code however, a factor of 1.05 may be important. > .... As far as I can tell, the usual lisp advocate response > to performance complaints is to either: > (a) deny there's a problem, > (b) say one day there won't be a problem, or > (c) suggest you write code that looks like FORTRAN and > manually weigh expression trees and other insanity. This is gross oversimplification. As a "lisp advocate," I consistently maintain that if and when there is a performance problem, it can be dealt with in the same way one deals with performance problems in any language. There is not a generalized performance problem inherent in lisp.