Benchmark - PERQ CL vs Apollo T

[Skef Wholey <Wholey@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>]

    Date: Monday, 8 October 1984  13:17-EDT
    From: Charles Dolan <cpd at UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA>

    UCLA has a demo unit of the new PERQ 68000 based workstation
    running Common Lisp.

The PERQ is not a 68000 based machine.  There's a bit-sliced processor inside
of it.  It's basically a 16-bit machine.

    		PERQ		DN300		DN460

    (tak ...) [3]	6.3 sec		3.4/6.3 sec [2]	1/2.7 sec [2]

Tak runs in under 5 seconds on my Perq.  The Perq Common Lisp implementation
has been undergoing extensive tuning during the past few months, and I bet
you've got a somewhat old version.

The current situation is that people at CMU are still doing most of the
development work, while the Lisp people at Perq systems are doing things like
getting better interfaces to the operating system servers up.

Over the past two weeks I've added register instructions to the Lisp
instruction set (full runtime type-checking, by the way).  Some benchmarky
things have improved dramatically, for example,
	(dotimes (i 1000000))	; That's one million
took over 20 seconds before the addition of registers, and now takes 5.5
seconds.  I bet the register instructions will help some of your other
benchmarks as well.

"Benchmarking is, at best, a black art."  I'd like to see some large bechmarks
run on a large number of machines (something like OPS5).  I like things along
the lines of compilation speed and how fast the editor reads and writes files.
Those are things that most people do a lot, and spend time waiting for.

Common Lisp and T are very different languages, and I bet I could devise some
benchmarks that ran significantly faster on the Perq than on the Apollo
machines.  Have you tried CTAK (TAK using catch and throw)?

I don't want to thwart your benchmarking effort, and I'm not offended or
anything, but I felt I should mention that the Perq Lisp system is still in the
tuning phase.

--Skef