Richard Kelsey wrote:

>>   I think the overhead is largely unimportant. Unless you are
>> interacting
>>   with near-c-speed-sufficiently-smart-scheme-compilers (better think of
>>   crawling-lame-naive-bytecode-interpreter) the overhead of this will
>>   be completely lost in the noise the Scheme implementation produces.

> I meant the overhead of manipulating Scheme objects from C code,
> which is independent of the speed at which the Scheme code runs.
> It would be nice if the C code ran at near-C speed, no matter how
> lame or otherwise the speed of the Scheme code.

And I mean that the "noise" of argument evaluation, procedure invocation
and procedure return will outweigh the cost of a couple of extra
indirections. If the wrapped C code is long-running, it should extract
the data from the passed Scheme argument values anyway, and convert
it into a representation it can easily handle.

cheers,
felix