Re: Bad news from the module/environment front

[Christian Lynbech <chl@tbit.dk>]

>>>>> "Telford" == Telford Tendys <telford@eng.uts.edu.au> writes:

Telford> The other thing is that, while speed is nice, it is not the
Telford> prime importance of a scripting language.

IMHO it is quite dangerous to make this kind of distinction. Not that
I think that speed should go before anything else, but we should not
accept that it does not matter.

To me, the main thing is that the architecture is sound, also with
respect to speed. It does not have to be fast now, but there must
exist a justifiable belief that it can be made fast eventually.

The evaluator/interpreter can be slow only if a compiler exists for
those in need of speed. Many systems uses such a setup, guile
currently (almost) has neither.

Telford> Remember the target audience -- people who have working code
Telford> to do the guts of their job and want to support scripting or
Telford> interactive evaluation with minimal effort.

If we box ourselves in by coding only for the target audience, Guile
will die a slow but certain death. People will start using Guile, hit
the performance roof and switch to something else, and most people do
such an exercise only once (even switching to another scheme is a
non-trivial exercise).

Tcl has been done this road. Tcl7 used a simple implementation basing
everything on strings, which proved inadequate for the stuff people
wanted to use tcl for. Only few users would be prepared to use one
implementation for small scale jobs and another for large scale jobs.

Telford> GC ... is such an unsolved issue and ... it might be better
Telford> to admit defeat

But still others are doing rather well in this respect. Mark/sweep is
not exactly rocket science anymore, and since (any) GC does take time,
it makes it all the more important not to create more garbage than
necessary.


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Christian Lynbech          | Telebit Communications A/S                       
Fax:   +45 8628 8186       | Fabrikvej 11, DK-8260 Viby J
Phone: +45 8628 8177 + 28  | email: chl@tbit.dk --- URL: http://www.tbit.dk
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)