Re: a potential lisp convert, and interpreting the shootout

hi jon,

You may be interested in my ray tracer benchmarks:

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/languages.html

thank you! very enlightening. i read the analysis. i have a few
questions about this excerpt

"However, the designers of the ML family of languages (including OCaml
and SML) deliberately avoided some of the functionality provided by
Lisp in order to facilitate static type checking and improve
performance."

i guess i misunderstood something. does lisp not have any type
inference? or does it have partial type inference if you explicitly
declare the types for some variables and not others?

"Specifically, Lisp provides macros to customise syntax and allows them
to be entwined with ordinary code, and provides run-time code
manipulation. SML provides neither macros nor run-time code
generation."


"OCaml provides camlp4 macros, a limited form that are separate from
the language, and the derived language MetaOCaml also provides run-time
code generation"

are camlp4 macros as powerful as lisp macros?

and, is the run-time code generation of MetaOCaml as powerful as lisp's
'compile' function?


in the bigger picture, do you foresee any advancements to either lisp
or ocaml that would improve either of them, maybe by sharing ideas?

thanks,

henry





On my computer, those benchmarks show Lisp to be roughly twice as slow and
twice as verbose as OCaml.

while i'm not surprised lisp is slower for this benchmark, i am
confused why it would be more verbose.


However, the benchmark is quite specific. It
only tests data structures (trees) and floating point performance (ray
sphere). Also, timings vary considerably between architectures. Now that
Intel has a decent CPU, I'll be interested to see a Core Duo version of
this benchmark.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
Objective CAML for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists

.

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