Linas Vepstas <xxxxxx@gmail.com> writes:

> I'd like scheme to be as-fast-as-possible, as what else is it offering the world? it's not going to be python or java or rust. It may as well be tight.

One thing that impressed me about Scheme is that, while not being totally
about performance, it avoided features that forced using hard to
optimize approaches.

That’s where I see the role of the standard: leave the implementations
to actually produce the high performance code, but take care to make
their job easy.

Making a high-performance Scheme should not require building a huge V8
or SpiderMonkey or Javascript Core system with their massive memory
consumption and bulging complexity. Those are the consequence of
language-design-by-accident. The same goes for Java and the JVM. Yes, it
is awesome what performance they got, but it should not be that hard.

Finding the right limitations for a language to make it easy to optimize
without placing the burden on the programmers is hard; but it’s one of
the things that make Scheme special to me.

I loved it that the discussion about ER and syntax-case was decided on
the basis of “we can only have one, because if we implement one, the
other provably¹ requires more than O(N) for expansion”.

¹: I did not see the proof, though — maybe I should have dug deeper.

Best wishes,
Arne
--
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
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