Re: Making Guile slower (3.4 and 6.7%). (was Re: NIMP thing)

[Greg Harvey <Greg dot Harvey at thezone dot net>]

Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@mdj.nada.kth.se> writes:

> In any case, I configured a Guile from 1999-12-10 and a current Guile
> with configure option --disable-shared, compiled, and ran the `eval1'
> benchmark on an i686 and a sparc machine.  The results are 3.4%
> slowdown on the i686 and 6.7% slowdown on the sparc.  While one should
> of course always be suspicious of benchmarks 

Particularly when the benchmark does something trivial that only
covers a small portion of the evaluator. This one's about as useful as
the benchmark I posted showing that SCM_NIMP actually speeds up small
loops on my computer. In any case, what you're interested in here is
*only* the NIMP change, not all the other code changes (which can also
cause performance drift). So, a better benchmark (even on a lame test
like this; a good idea for anyone wanting good guile benchmarks would
be to port the gabriel 'marks to guile; they are already available for
scheme) would come from just using redefined SCM_FOOP's with that
guile, and seeing if you see a difference.

-- 
Gregh