5 ms·

Extant lisp compilers are not 'state of the art'; that they are is a bad meme. SBCL certainly attains very usable performance, though.

pjmlp 3y ago
They certainly are, when compared with many alternatives.
- moonchild 3y ago
  Which alternatives? Sbcl: - Requires manual type annotations to achieve remotely reasonable performance - Does no interesting optimisations around method dispatch - Chokes on code which reassigns variables - Doesn't model memory (sroa, store forwarding, alias analysis, concurrency...) - Doesn't do code motion - Has a decent, but not particularly good gc Hotspot hits on all of these points. It's true that if you hand-hold the compiler, you can get fairly reasonable machine code out of it, same as you can do with some c compilers these days. But it's 80s technology and it shows.
  - bo-tato 3y ago
    It seems with the massive amounts of money and full time engineers JVM has to be far more advanced technically, but does it actually make a difference? I don't know anything about compilers I just know LuaJIT is faster than any dynamic language on the JVM, SBCL is much faster than lisp on the JVM, chez scheme is much faster then scheme on the JVM, pypy is faster than jython. For statically-typed GC languages that should be comparable to Java, Go and Ocaml are famous for having very simple and fast compilers (fast as in they compile quickly without doing much optimization) and they don't perform any worse than Java.
  - lispm 3y ago
    Do you have an idea/opinion on Chez Scheme and its compiler?
    - moonchild 3y ago
      I haven't used it. From what I hear, it generates ok code, but compromises on codegen quality for the sake of simplicity.
  - sillymath 3y ago
    What language don't require type annotations to achieve good performance?, more specifically tell me any programming language that can beat sbcl at speed without using type annotations.
    - moonchild 3y ago
      self, javascript (v8), java (hotspot; generics are latently monomorphised according to hotness; also see 'invokedynamic'), apl (apl\3000)
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        I don't think you can say that java "doesn't use type annotations".
        tmtvl 3y ago
        Well, technically you do have the var keyword now. var x = MyAwesomeClassFactoryBeanTemplate.getBean().getFactoryInstance().createNewMyAwesomeClass(foo, bar);
        kirankp89 3y ago
        I am not super familiar with Java but that syntax typically implies type inference, which is not the same as not needing type annotations.
        bcrosby95 3y ago
        Not only is it type inference, it's limited to locally declared variables.
    - hayley-patton 3y ago
      Not having used them, I'd expect the Truffle implementations of Python and Ruby to do well, seeing as Graal handles #2-5 of moonchild's list. From there #1 might fall out. (Apparently the fancy GCs for #6 are only in the Enterprise Edition though?) I'm working on a better, parallel but still far from Java state-of-the-art GC for SBCL <https://zenodo.org/record/7816398 https://zenodo.org/record/7816398> - which presumably is some skin in the game.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    First of all you're missing Alegro and LispWorks. Secondly, we are speaking about dynamic languages over here, that keep using C and Fortran.
    - moonchild 3y ago
      I agreed with you that sbcl has usable performance (like c and fortran compilers). I disagreed that its performance is state of the art or particularly commendable. Are allegro and lispworks appreciably better? My understanding was that lispworks, at least, forked from cmucl a long time ago and put less work into python than sbcl did.
    - mm007emko 3y ago
      I have LispWorks (I like the IDE) and although the hybbyist, non-commercial licenses are not out-of-reach for many (if not most) people, many (even companies) prefer running on free-of-charge stuff. My current employer doesn't even pay for PyCharm (main language at my current workplace is Python) and they are dirt cheap compared to e.g. Microsoft MSDN Subscription. I didn't stress the garbage collector enough so I can say that LW is faster or slower than other CL implementations. I'm currently doing an algorithmic research where the strain on garbage collector is not really that big, it's mainly about numerical performance and SBCL is by far the best from what I tried - LW, SBCL, CCL, Clisp, ABCL, ECL. Garbage collector takes usually 1-2% of run time which isn't that bad. I suppose that if I stressed it more than LW garbage collector would outperform SBCL but that's only my theory based on target audience of LW. If you have experience with Allegro and LispWorks and can compare it to other implementations, could yous hare it, please? I'm quite curious. There isn't much on the internet about this topic.

pjmlp 3y ago

They certainly are, when compared with many alternatives.

moonchild 3y ago
Which alternatives? Sbcl: - Requires manual type annotations to achieve remotely reasonable performance - Does no interesting optimisations around method dispatch - Chokes on code which reassigns variables - Doesn't model memory (sroa, store forwarding, alias analysis, concurrency...) - Doesn't do code motion - Has a decent, but not particularly good gc Hotspot hits on all of these points. It's true that if you hand-hold the compiler, you can get fairly reasonable machine code out of it, same as you can do with some c compilers these days. But it's 80s technology and it shows.
- bo-tato 3y ago
  It seems with the massive amounts of money and full time engineers JVM has to be far more advanced technically, but does it actually make a difference? I don't know anything about compilers I just know LuaJIT is faster than any dynamic language on the JVM, SBCL is much faster than lisp on the JVM, chez scheme is much faster then scheme on the JVM, pypy is faster than jython. For statically-typed GC languages that should be comparable to Java, Go and Ocaml are famous for having very simple and fast compilers (fast as in they compile quickly without doing much optimization) and they don't perform any worse than Java.
- lispm 3y ago
  Do you have an idea/opinion on Chez Scheme and its compiler?
  - moonchild 3y ago
    I haven't used it. From what I hear, it generates ok code, but compromises on codegen quality for the sake of simplicity.
- sillymath 3y ago
  What language don't require type annotations to achieve good performance?, more specifically tell me any programming language that can beat sbcl at speed without using type annotations.
  - moonchild 3y ago
    self, javascript (v8), java (hotspot; generics are latently monomorphised according to hotness; also see 'invokedynamic'), apl (apl\3000)
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      I don't think you can say that java "doesn't use type annotations".
      - tmtvl 3y ago
        Well, technically you do have the var keyword now. var x = MyAwesomeClassFactoryBeanTemplate.getBean().getFactoryInstance().createNewMyAwesomeClass(foo, bar);
        kirankp89 3y ago
        I am not super familiar with Java but that syntax typically implies type inference, which is not the same as not needing type annotations.
        bcrosby95 3y ago
        Not only is it type inference, it's limited to locally declared variables.
  - hayley-patton 3y ago
    Not having used them, I'd expect the Truffle implementations of Python and Ruby to do well, seeing as Graal handles #2-5 of moonchild's list. From there #1 might fall out. (Apparently the fancy GCs for #6 are only in the Enterprise Edition though?) I'm working on a better, parallel but still far from Java state-of-the-art GC for SBCL <https://zenodo.org/record/7816398 https://zenodo.org/record/7816398> - which presumably is some skin in the game.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  First of all you're missing Alegro and LispWorks. Secondly, we are speaking about dynamic languages over here, that keep using C and Fortran.
  - moonchild 3y ago
    I agreed with you that sbcl has usable performance (like c and fortran compilers). I disagreed that its performance is state of the art or particularly commendable. Are allegro and lispworks appreciably better? My understanding was that lispworks, at least, forked from cmucl a long time ago and put less work into python than sbcl did.
  - mm007emko 3y ago
    I have LispWorks (I like the IDE) and although the hybbyist, non-commercial licenses are not out-of-reach for many (if not most) people, many (even companies) prefer running on free-of-charge stuff. My current employer doesn't even pay for PyCharm (main language at my current workplace is Python) and they are dirt cheap compared to e.g. Microsoft MSDN Subscription. I didn't stress the garbage collector enough so I can say that LW is faster or slower than other CL implementations. I'm currently doing an algorithmic research where the strain on garbage collector is not really that big, it's mainly about numerical performance and SBCL is by far the best from what I tried - LW, SBCL, CCL, Clisp, ABCL, ECL. Garbage collector takes usually 1-2% of run time which isn't that bad. I suppose that if I stressed it more than LW garbage collector would outperform SBCL but that's only my theory based on target audience of LW. If you have experience with Allegro and LispWorks and can compare it to other implementations, could yous hare it, please? I'm quite curious. There isn't much on the internet about this topic.