Re: Amulet 3 times faster than Garnet

[cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)]

atwoodj@ada.CS.ORST.EDU (John Atwood) writes:

>In the Garnet FAQ 
>* Speed: We spend 5 years and lots of effort optimizing our Lisp code,
>but it was still pretty slow on "conventional" machines.  The initial
>version of the C++ version, with similar functionality, appears to be
>about THREE TIMES FASTER than the current Lisp version without any
>tuning at all.

I don't think that is a meaningful number to compare the speed of
Common Lisp and C++ in general. Amulet is the second system and has
probably a cleaner and tighter implementation.

Additionally, in some places C++ *requires* faster coding techniques
where a Lisp solution may be more elegant. In Amulet, formulars are
mapped to ordinary functions in constant space. This is ugly and the
Lisp version was more elegant -but slower- in this regard.

>The C++ code is now available (Amulet alpha 0.2) at:
>http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/amulet/www/amulet-home.html

Just for note, I had a look at the docs and ran some code and have to
say this is a nice toolkit, powerful and easy to understand. 
Congratulations. 

Martin
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