Re: Including code in a non-Guile language into Guix

[Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name>]

> I know that Guix is mainly written in Guile, but has much thought
> gone into optimizing these commands by rewriting some of the code in
> a more performance-oriented language like C?


this is a slow-dying, but completely unjustified stereotype of C and "highlevel" languages like lisp.

the truth is that for any non-trivial problem/domain it's easier to write faster lisp code than C.

the reason is that even if a FOR loop runs twice as fast in C (it's not), if the programmer can spend more time thinking/experimenting with the domain, and come up with a better optimization *in the domain*, then he may gain *orders of magnitude*, not a mere doubling that "more performance-oriented languages" provide.

and if the task is about the most efficient use of the hardware at hand (think of simulations), then i have way more tools to profile my lisp code, and it's way easier to extend the lisp compiler under me with some custom-made primitives to peephole optimize my hotspots. or run the same code with and without custom made instrumentation to gain more insights about the bottlenecks. or compile my hotspots at runtime, if e.g. i have a task that rarely changes, but must be repeated endlessly (think of a firewall). or if the domain is such, then straight out write a custom compiler for a DSL that is specific to the task at hand, and seamlessly integrates into the the rest of my lisp codebase.

when coding in C you're wasting a lot of your attention on manually translating the domain to a verbose mess of C code that can't really encode much of the domain abstractions. writing C code is much more of a manual, lossy translation from domain-to-C than writing a lisp solution to the same problem, which is much more about converging lisp and your domain from both directions. and on top of this all, what a timesink debugging C code can be!

</rant>

PS: note though that the above is written from experience with more capable lisps like SBCL + Slime.

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• attila lendvai
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