3 ms·

> Because how else do you explain this madness: they spent three years developing a new version of Racket that et the end turned slower than the original! This

> Because how else do you explain this madness: they spent three years developing a new version of Racket that et the end turned slower than the original! This is just a blatant misunderstanding of what Racket on Chez is trying to do, and a very limited understanding of what “optimization” means for something as complex as a compiler/interpreter. The point of the Chez backend is to improve maintainability and portability, not to increase speed [1]. Racket used to have a custom Scheme interpreter with a lot of custom C that was difficult to work with, so instead a lot of that code was ported to Chez - easier for everyone, especially Racket devs, even if it might take a while to smooth out some of the (very modest) performance hits. And since you’re obviously totally ignorant as to why Racket decided to do all this work, it makes it hard to take your rant seriously. [1] https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/icfp19-fddkmstz.pdf https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/icfp19-fddkmstz.pdf

fern2000 6y ago
I think the case is simple here: Racket community was not capable of producing good programming language, so instead they decided to take someone else's better implementation: they decided to abandon the years and years of their efforts, because they realized that Kent Dybvig (a real hero i this story!) was better than all of them. That's why they decided to take his Chez scheme and parasitate on his effort. The very fact that they did this tells us a lot about Racket's community “achievements”!
- rscho 6y ago
  This is a strange, strange view of things. I guess all languages running on LLVM are parasites too, then. Did you know Idris also runs on Chez? Does that also say a lot about Edwin Brady's achievements? This is pure nonsense.
gus_massa 6y ago
I agree, but the paper you link has more than one year. Now the benchmarks are much better, and in most cases Racket CS is faster than Racket BC. I think the even point was a few month ago, but there were too many bugs (small bugs, in weird corner cases, but important enough to not switch until they were fixed). If you don't mind crappy graphics with numbers pulled out of the air https://imgur.com/a/9r0aJzd https://imgur.com/a/9r0aJzd The idea is trading a slower development speed for some time, to get more speed and features in the long run. Perhaps the change in the slope in BC is too much, and the current speed of CS is greater than the imaginary speed of a version of BC in an universe where BC didn't happen. I hope the crappy graphic in Paintbrush is enough to make it clear that the numbers are pulled out of the air. Anyway, one of the hard fact of the blog post submitted here is that in most cases the current version of CS is faster than the current version of BC.
- andredz 6y ago
  "Future versions of Racket CS" appears twice on the graph. It still understandable though.

fern2000 6y ago

I think the case is simple here: Racket community was not capable of producing good programming language, so instead they decided to take someone else's better implementation: they decided to abandon the years and years of their efforts, because they realized that Kent Dybvig (a real hero i this story!) was better than all of them. That's why they decided to take his Chez scheme and parasitate on his effort. The very fact that they did this tells us a lot about Racket's community “achievements”!

rscho 6y ago
This is a strange, strange view of things. I guess all languages running on LLVM are parasites too, then. Did you know Idris also runs on Chez? Does that also say a lot about Edwin Brady's achievements? This is pure nonsense.

gus_massa 6y ago

I agree, but the paper you link has more than one year. Now the benchmarks are much better, and in most cases Racket CS is faster than Racket BC. I think the even point was a few month ago, but there were too many bugs (small bugs, in weird corner cases, but important enough to not switch until they were fixed). If you don't mind crappy graphics with numbers pulled out of the air https://imgur.com/a/9r0aJzd https://imgur.com/a/9r0aJzd The idea is trading a slower development speed for some time, to get more speed and features in the long run. Perhaps the change in the slope in BC is too much, and the current speed of CS is greater than the imaginary speed of a version of BC in an universe where BC didn't happen. I hope the crappy graphic in Paintbrush is enough to make it clear that the numbers are pulled out of the air. Anyway, one of the hard fact of the blog post submitted here is that in most cases the current version of CS is faster than the current version of BC.

andredz 6y ago
"Future versions of Racket CS" appears twice on the graph. It still understandable though.