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On 7/26/06, Andre van Tonder <andre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have a few comments based on my experience in trying to implement the ICFP contest virtual machine specification using Scheme. I found that most Schemes were pretty much useless for this particular application
I also participated in the contest, and started with Scheme but ended up using C (the VM was much shorter and easier to express in C, apart from being faster). After the contest I tweaked my Scheme implementation, and when compiled with Chicken Scheme it was only 10x slower than C, using only R5RS and SRFIs 4 and 60. This was mostly thanks to using a 64-bit machine where I could do 32-bit arithmetic by masking out the high bits after each numeric operation: (bitwise-and #xFFFFFFFF expr). On a 32-bit machine almost every value would have been a bignum, totally destroying performance. This seems much more common and convenient than the aribtrary (and variable among different implementations) modulo arithmetic provided by the `fixnum' procedures of SRFI-77. -- Alex