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

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj at mdj dot nada dot kth dot se>]

Greg Harvey <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net> writes:

> 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.

Previously I tried to convey the idea that the right kind of benchmark
in this case is a worst-case benchmark.  (My benchmark isn't---I just
grabbed some code from another benchmark.)

_After_ we, by using such a benchmark, get information of _how_ the
performance has been influence, we can try to understand _why_.

When we understand why, we can better judge if this impact is
something we want to take or not.