4 Jan
2016
4 Jan
'16
5:53 a.m.
On 3 Jan 2016, at 23:35, Warren Toomey
<wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
Does anybodu have a measure of the expense of function calls under Unix
on either platform?
I don't have the reference to hand, but one of the things Lisp implementations
(probably Franz Lisp in particular) did on the VAX was not to use CALLS: they could do
this because they didn't need to interoperate with C except at known points (where
they would use the C calling conventions). This change made a really significant
difference to function call performance and meant that on call-heavy code Lisp was often
very competitive with C.
I can look up the reference (or, really, ask someone who remembers).
The VAX architecture and its performance horrors must have killed DEC, I guess.