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Comment by sigil

11 years ago

> Considering that SBCL is among the fastest programming language implementations there is...

Source for this? I'd love to find a really fast lisp or scheme. Hadn't heard SBCL was particularly fast, and the alioth benchmarks don't show anything special there.

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...

Edit: actually SBCL stacks up alright against languages like Go or Rust in the alioth benchmarks, so maybe that's what you had in mind.

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sigil

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krig  11 years ago

I'd say those numbers you link to are pretty amazing for a garbage collected language. Compared to Java, SBCL is roughly on par, with some benchmarks 2-3x slower and some 2-3x faster.

edit: To clarify, I'm not saying SBCL makes Common Lisp the fastest language (I don't even think that's a meaningful statement). But to be within 2-3x of the JVM or C (and even outperforming C in some scenarios) certainly puts SBCL among the fastest language implementations. All the other ones you mention (C, C++, Go, Java..) are indeed also among the fastest. :)

mrottenkolber  11 years ago

> Hadn't heard SBCL was particularly fast

What did you think was particularly faster than SBCL?

  • sigil  11 years ago

    > What did you think was particularly faster than SBCL?

    Haskell, Scala, Java, Go and of course C, C++, Fortran all outperform SBCL in the alioth benchmarks.

    Against the schemes, lisps, and "scripting" languages though SBCL stacks up favorably. I didn't notice that krig's comment was mainly comparing SBCL to this latter category ("programming language implementations").

    • mrottenkolber  11 years ago

      > Haskell, Scala, Java, Go and of course C, C++, Fortran all outperform SBCL in the alioth benchmarks.

      The way I read it, SBCL is in the same ballpark of what you mentioned above and magnitudes faster than the rest. Its a logarithmic scale.

      Then again its a biased selection of benchmarks. Try finding a faster regular expression engine than CL-PPCRE.

      I will stick to the stance pointed out by "Let Over Lambda": Common Lisp is--by language design--the fastest language around, as long as language X does not have COMPILE, it can not beat CL at a whole class of benchmarks (not found on alioth).

    • ohyes  11 years ago

      Also consider that the c/++ versions use intrinsics which means it's basically a compiler vs random assembly level code. Without that level of optimization they're fairly equivalent.