Re: Is Elisp really that slow? (was: Why is Elisp slow?)

[Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>]

tomas wrote:

> Different languages exist for a reason, and
> carry with them a whole set of different
> cultures, so they'll tend to express
> a problem in subtly different way (leading to
> subtly differing semantics). How do you
> account for the fact that some problem
> expressed in C won't do array bounds
> checking, while in Java it will do them
> dynamically all the time (costing runtime),
> whereas in some smart functional language the
> compiler will do most of that work most of
> the time, due to advanced compiler magic?
> How do you account for the fact that in
> language A the programmer will take 100 times
> longer to master the language, but one-tenth
> of the time to write a program? The fact that
> this compiler will produce runtimes twice as
> fast, but ten times as fat, and take 50 times
> the compile time?

One program will finish execution with
a correct result at time X and another at
time Y and it will not be X = Y. So one
language, with associated tools, is faster!

If one language has a better compiler, a better
programmer, and so on, that's part of the game.

You can't have a better computer, that's all.

> Clock accuracy/precision/resolution will be
> the least of your problems in
> a cross-language benchmark.

How about a zero-gravity chamber then?

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