Re: Performance assistance / advice

As an aside, the Chez Scheme compiler source, by R. Kent Dybvig and accomplices at the University of Indiana, is well worth studying.

-- Tahoma

> On Mar 12, 2025, at 4:43 PM, Bradford Miller (as bradford dot w dot miller at gmail dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Scheme was invented at MIT by Guy L Steele, Jr. and Gerry Sussman. It was originally created to study Hewitt Actors, and later was repurposed into a pedagogical language for teaching. See AI Memo 349 (MIT) “SCHEME An Interpreter for Extended Lambda Calculus” December 1975. (It’s available on the net).
> 
> Steele and Danny Hillis (MIT PhDs both) did collaborate on “Connection Machine Lisp” https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/319838.319870
> 
> However Connection Machine Lisp was created as an extension to Common Lisp, and not Scheme (though they do mention that it would have been an attractive alternative).
> 
> I’m not aware of any Scheme that was available for the Connection Machine (but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one). It certainly wouldn’t have been “an outgrowth for the CM” however.
> 
> Hillis’s CM was based on a 1981 proposal which led to his PhD in 1985. As you can see, this is significantly after the date Scheme was first published. (He was an undergrad at MIT in 75).
> 
> 
>> On Mar 12, 2025, at 6:15 PM, David McClain (as dbm at refined-audiometrics dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> This discussion, and today’s article on D-Wave in Ars Technica, reminds me…
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I once had a computer that was a SIMD engine with 4096 processors, arranged in a 64x64 pyramidal interconnect. Special purpose computers are much better attuned to certain problems than Von Neumann serial machines (no matter however many cores). Our problem was implementing a target detection system - a virtual retina, if you will. D-Wave solves the Ising Model.
>> 
>> But coupled to all these basic problems is a tower of infrastructure with non-numerical needs - files, queues, lists, GUI’s, etc, etc. And that variety of infrastructure is where Lisp shines above them all. If you really have a hard problem to solve, then choose the best architecture you can, and couple it to a Lisp orchestrator.
>> 
>> I believe Scheme was an outgrowth in the late 80s for the Connection Machine??
>> 
>> - DM
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Mar 12, 2025, at 09:15, Yuri Davidovsky (as work at disclosure dot ie) <[email protected]> wrote:
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>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On 12 Mar 2025, at 16:51, Tim Bradshaw <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Perhaps there are 100 full-time-equivalents working on Lisp systems world-wide: I expect that is rather generous.  That's why Lisp compilers produce code which is perhaps not quite as fast that produced by C-family compilers.
>>> 
>>> That is exactly the reason. There are a lot more man hours going into the C compilers than into the Lisp compilers so Lisp is always going to play catch-up. Personally, it does not bother me, I would use Lisp for business logic and if there are computational bottlenecks, I’d resort to writing asm helpers. 
>>> 
>>> It is macros and repl that have kept me coming back to lisp over the years, not its performance. In fact, as been mentioned, people routinely write heavy stuff even in Python, by leveraging foreign interface to offload computations. It is pretty much the standard in machine learning these days and that stuff is as heavy to compute as it gets.
>>> 
>>> With that said, there are things like llvm that may be able to help close the gap on the compiler front, it is a bit surprising that there haven’t been any attempts yet. Maybe that is not really something that majority of Lisp people care about at the end of the day.
>>> 
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>> 
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