Subject: Re: Floating Point speed in Common Lisp From: Erik Naggum <clerik@naggum.no> Date: 1998/03/16 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3099027379447143@naggum.no> * Matthew McDonald | Do you have any examples to substantiate this claim? not any good set of particular examples, but 15 years of experience with C on lots of platforms and lots of compilers has alerted me to the fact that C compilers and environments differ _very_ much in quality, more than my experience with (native-compiled) Common Lisp implementations and environments do. Common Lisp implementations are generally quite good, but the same is not necessarily true for C compilers -- naive compilation of C is often a viable option for small systems. if you need a specific example, consider the bundled C compiler with SunOS 4.X with the commercial compiler for Solaris 2.X. GCC 2.8.1 beats the former by a factor of 1.7, but the Solaris 2.X commercial C compiler appears to be slightly better than GCC. I find it interesting that you jump up to require substantiation of the claim that C implementations differ, but do not challenge that Common Lisp implementations do. this is the general sentiment out there, as sort of a cultural requirement on programmers. C is not fast. C is primitive, which means it has a potential of being fast if the programmer is a genius and the compiler is on his side. if the programmer is an idiot, and the compiler expects smarter programmers, you will get abysmal performance. e.g., a system currently written in C but which I am replacing with one rewritten in Common Lisp shows a promise of reducing system requirements by a factor of between 5 and 6, after months of work to decipher the incredibly bad C code to figure out what it actually does. #:Erik -- religious cult update in light of new scientific discoveries: "when we cannot go to the comet, the comet must come to us."