17 Feb
2018
17 Feb
'18
4:05 a.m.
On Fri, 16 Feb 2018 13:01:14 -0800 Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Larry McVoy writes:
So people have called me on the claim that lisp is not
fast. Here's a
rebuttal.
Please write a clone of GNU grep in lisp to demonstrate that the claim
that lisp is slower that C is false.
Best of luck and I'll be super impressed if you can get even remotely
close without dropping into C or assembler. If you do get close, I
will with draw my claim, stand corrected, point future "lisp is slow"
people at the lisp-grep, and buy you dinner and/or drinks.
If you want to do more of an apples to apples comparison, you
should pick a brand new problem not known to be solved in
either C or Lisp so that both sides start at the same point!
I do think that if you consider just the raw performance as
the sole metric, C will almost always win. After all it is
sort of a portable assembly language & you can compile
programs in most language to C. But in the real world many
other factors matter too. So to make the contest a bit more
fair, you should put a time limit on the effort.