4 ms·
I was impressed first by the fact that whoever designed this particular Lisp system cared about efficiency. This isn't a particularly unusual approach. Common
by phoe-krk 8y ago
I was impressed first by the fact that whoever designed this particular Lisp system cared about efficiency.
This isn't a particularly unusual approach. Common Lisp, a contemporary Lisp dialect, was designed with efficiency in mind. The approach of "Lisp = slow + inefficient + spending 80% of time on garbage collection" is a myth.
- SolarNet 8y agoThis article is set about 20 years prior to common lisp's standardization. It was a reasonable belief then.
- dasmoth 8y agoIt’s set in 1983. “Common LISP The Language” was published in 1984. (The ANSI standard was 1994. Still nowhere near 20 years).
- coldtea 8y agoWell, 10 years is the same order of magnitude as 20.
- lispm 8y agoNot really. If you were at MIT in 1983 then one would have probably access to Maclisp, whose compiler had seen some work by then. The first Scheme implementation was also written in Maclisp.
- ken 8y agoThis comment was regarding TCO, which Common Lisp (unlike Scheme) doesn't guarantee. Many CL compilers today offer it, but IIRC that was rare in the 1980's.
- deckard1 8y agoThere was also a lot of consternation when TCO was formalized as part of R*RS. It's a fundamental part of how Scheme works, so it was obviously necessary. But from a compiler writer point-of-view, it was a rather exotic demand at the time. Though we've moved from a period of languages as defined by a spec to languages defined by implementation. Such as Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python. So what is "normal" has changed a lot.