Using Guile for soft-realtime

Using Guile for soft-realtime

[Olivier Dion via General Guile related discussions]

Hi Guile's community,

I would like to use Guile as a scripting engine for a soft-realtime
software.  I'm a little bit worried about the asynchronous nature of the
GC and its nondeterministic time.

Searching in the manual, I found the section 5.7.4.2 about performance
constraints, which is empty unfortunately.

Thus, does anyone had similar experiences in the past?  Are my worries
even valids?

-- 
Olivier Dion
PolyMtl

Re: Using Guile for soft-realtime

[Joshua Branson via General Guile related discussions]

Hey Olivier!

I've heard that guile is generally faster than python, but there are
some other schemes that are faster, notably chez scheme.

I will also say that Andy Wingo (one of the guile maintainers) is
working on making guile code "within" an order of magnitude of the speed
of C code.  I would say to try to build your program in guile and post
back here.

Good luck!

--
Joshua Branson
Sent from Emacs and Gnus

Re: Using Guile for soft-realtime

[olivier.dion--- via General Guile related discussions]

On Sun, 27 Dec 2020, Joshua Branson via General Guile related discussions <guile-user@gnu.org> wrote:
> Hey Olivier!
>
> I've heard that guile is generally faster than python, but there are
> some other schemes that are faster, notably chez scheme.

Yes.  I remember seing somewhere that Guile is much more energy
efficiant than Python.  It's a shame that the latter is more popular
than the former.

>
> I will also say that Andy Wingo (one of the guile maintainers) is
> working on making guile code "within" an order of magnitude of the speed
> of C code.  I would say to try to build your program in guile and post
> back here.

Well the software in question is a video game engine.  But I managed to
integrate Guile into the engine, deactivating the Guile context in
critical section of C code.  Work like a charm!

-- 
Olivier Dion
PolyMtl

Re: Using Guile for soft-realtime

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1122 bytes --]


olivier.dion--- via General Guile related discussions <guile-user@gnu.org> writes:

> On Sun, 27 Dec 2020, Joshua Branson via General Guile related discussions <guile-user@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Hey Olivier!
>>
>> I've heard that guile is generally faster than python, but there are
>> some other schemes that are faster, notably chez scheme.
>
> Yes.  I remember seing somewhere that Guile is much more energy
> efficiant than Python.  It's a shame that the latter is more popular
> than the former.

There are actual reasons for that popularity — part of which is awesome
API uniformity throughout most of Python, another is that most people
avoid Python for performance-relevant parts and instead hand over to
C-extensions. And thanks to being so widely used most of its libraries
already had most of their bugs ironed out.

You can do the same in Guile, and thanks to the flexibility of Scheme we
can graft better APIs if we’re careful to keep newcomers in mind.

We’re not yet at the same level, though.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein
ohne es zu merken

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 1125 bytes --]

Re: Using Guile for soft-realtime

[jbranso]

Awesome!  Well done chap!  Jolly good sport!

January 24, 2021 11:25 AM, "Olivier Dion" <olivier.dion@polymtl.ca> wrote:

> On Sun, 27 Dec 2020, Joshua Branson via General Guile related discussions <guile-user@gnu.org>
> wrote:
> 
>> Hey Olivier!
>> 
>> I've heard that guile is generally faster than python, but there are
>> some other schemes that are faster, notably chez scheme.
> 
> Yes. I remember seing somewhere that Guile is much more energy
> efficiant than Python. It's a shame that the latter is more popular
> than the former.
> 
>> I will also say that Andy Wingo (one of the guile maintainers) is
>> working on making guile code "within" an order of magnitude of the speed
>> of C code. I would say to try to build your program in guile and post
>> back here.
> 
> Well the software in question is a video game engine. But I managed to
> integrate Guile into the engine, deactivating the Guile context in
> critical section of C code. Work like a charm!
> 
> --
> Olivier Dion
> PolyMtl