Subject: Re: Floating Point speed in Common Lisp From: Erik Naggum <clerik@naggum.no> Date: 1998/03/13 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3098801908586746@naggum.no> * Christopher J. Vogt | I forget if it was Steele or Gabriel who observed that one of the things | that makes programming in common lisp uniquely different from other | languages, is that to get good performance, you have to be intimately | familiar with your implementation. This sort of issue doesn't exist in | C, for example. One implementation of C is generally as fast (within a | factor of 2) as another. However, CL implementations can vary quite a | bit, in different areas. One might have (relatively) good FP performance | but horrible Bignum performance etc. I beg to differ. C systems (compilers, libraries, etc) generally differ by just as large factors as Common Lisp, often more, when non-trivial functions are used, and they tend to be for non-trivial programs, and optimizing C is generally very hard beyond the simple cases. I'm not saying that CL is doing a better job than C in the general case, but I'm getting somewhat peeved with the repetitive claims that C is so fast. it isn't. it never was. it's just that the language is fairly transparent down to the machine level so when you change something in the C code, you can predict the effect on the compiled machine code. that doesn't make it _fast_, it only ingratiates the control-freak aspect of most programmers. #:Erik -- God grant me serenity to accept the code I cannot change, courage to change the code I can, and wisdom to know the difference.