Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel-eecis!gatech!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!cs.tu-berlin.de!news.uni-hamburg.de!news.Hanse.DE!wavehh.hanse.de!cracauer
From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: Lisp Compilation in Linux(long-ish)
Message-ID: <1997Mar6.110141.7231@wavehh.hanse.de>
Keywords: Lisp Compiler Linux
Reply-To: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de
Organization: '(a (cons tructive organization))
References: <5fi60g$gms@pelican.cs.ucla.edu> <1997Mar5.105358.18907@wavehh.hanse.de> <5fl8rq$alu@delphi.cs.ucla.edu>
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 97 11:01:41 GMT
Lines: 47

cardo@cs.ucla.edu (Ric Crabbe) writes:

[...]

>  What I conclude is that code generated as a result of the CMUCL
>compiler is between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude faster than code
>generated by gcl's compiler.  WOW!
>My initial results from the Sun server indicated an improvement of 2
>orders of magnitude.

>  I still haven't tested my real code as I'm having some dialect problems
>(see another post), but when I do, I'll certainly post them.

Well, the real application will for sure be more useful than the code
pieces you posted. 

I noticed you have no declaration in them. CMUCL is for sure better
when compiling code with no declarations, I expect the difference to
be smaller when you narrow types down as possible (of course, they're
no need to do so if you find an implementation that is fast enough :-)

>>Possible solutions:
>	...
>>3) Use the profiler to see where Gcl spends its time.

>  I don't know how to use the profiler (didn't even know there was one).
>Can you give me a pointer to some documentation?

Ops, gcl doesn't have one, sorry. Maybe it's possible to build a gcl
binary that has all of your compiled code statically linked in and
then use the normal GNU profiler to find out more, but that's quite
much to do for possibly hard to use information.

And one more thing, although I have no doubt that CMUCL generally
produces faster code, I'm not really happy that this discussion might
lead to overrated impressions how big the differnce is. If the
performance problems with Gcl persist, it might be good to ask the Gcl
mailing list for possibly missed optimizations. As far as I know, the
only area where Gcl is really slow is PCL/CLOS, due to its compiler
workings.

Martin
-- 
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Martin_Cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de http://cracauer.cons.org  Fax.: +4940 5228536
"As far as I'm concerned,  if something is so complicated that you can't ex-
 plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin
