Re: Guile benchmark

[Chris Vine <chris@cvine.freeserve.co.uk>]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2017 11:28:32 +0100
Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de> wrote:
> Chris Vine <chris@cvine.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, 27 Feb 2017 21:00:54 +0100
> > Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> wrote:  
> >> Hi,
> >> 
> >> On Thu 26 Jan 2017 09:39, Rchar <rchar@protonmail.com> writes:  
> >> > https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/benchmark.html
> >> > Is Guile slow or fast, comparing to others?    
> >> 
> >> Schemes that compile to native code go faster.  Guile compiles to
> >> bytecode right now, so it's generally (though not always!) slower
> >> than the native-compiling schemes.  But compared to the
> >> bytecode-interpreter schemes it's pretty fast.  
> >
> > On reading this, out of interest I wrote a very simple program
> > solving primes, using the basic 'seive odd divisors to square root'
> > algorithm. I tested guile-2.0, guile-2.2, chicken and chez scheme
> > on it.
> >
> > guile-2.0 was a little slower than chicken with chicken compiled to
> > C, but guile-2.2 on that test took about 75% of the time of
> > chicken, and about 50% of the time of guile-2.0.  chez scheme was
> > fastest of all, taking about 50% of the time of chicken.  OK,
> > chicken may not be the fastest of "compile to C" schemes.  
> 
> Do I read this correctly that Chez took only about 30% less time than
> Guile 2.2?
> 
> Could you try stalin, too? (Chez wins 28 comparisons, Stalin 14, so
> that would be an obvious target)

I feared that my enumeration might confuse.

No, on my Haswell laptop running 64-bit linux, solving the 40,000th
prime (479909) is 1.26 times faster in chez scheme than in guile-2.1.7,
on the simple algorithm. (0.509 seconds versus 0.624 seconds, on a
i7-4712HQ CPU @ 2.30GHz.)  This is only the time taken in the body of
the calculation.  Start-up times and printing times and so forth are
ignored.

I have just tried out the same code on an older Sandybridge desktop
@3.30 GHz running 32-bit linux which I can access remotely, and that had
chez scheme 1.7 times faster than guile-2.1.7 so it looks to be
somewhat CPU and/or cache and/or pointer-width sensitive. Anyway, it is
just one benchmark.

I think I am about schemed out so installing Stalin is probably not an
option.  Like you, I am told it is fast.  Guile's selling point IMO is
its libraries and its FFI.  Guile 2.2 certainly seems adequately fast
at run time.  Possibly compile times may be an issue, I don't know.

Chris