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Date:Tue, 12 Oct 2004 16:09:23 +0000 (UTC) 
Subject:Re: string library question (fwd) 
From:bfulg 
Volume-ID: 

--- Aaron Sloman wrote:

> Have you thought about the implications of your
> comments for the (very nasty) Ackermann function?
> 
> I haven't!

As it turns out, it wasn't necessary to run the tests
as they currently stand.  Certainly it will become
more of a problem if we increase the size of 'N', but
for now the default stack is sufficient.

If you look at
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/bench/ackermann/,
you can see that Poplog falls somewhere in the middle
as far as CPU use, even beating such tail-call
optimizing languages such as MzScheme, Guile, and even
the byte-compiled implementation of Objective Caml!

In general, the Pop11 Poplog versions of the tests
tend to be slightly faster than the Lisp Poplog
versions, but not by much.  I think that's quite
amazing, and indicates that there is very little
overhead in using a language implemented in Pop11 on
top of Poplog.

Another interesting outcome of this testing is that I
achieved very good performance using very naive Pop11
implementations of the tests.  I am no guru Pop11
hacker; I basically tooko the Java implementations of
various tests, launched the Emacs pop-mode and
pop-help modes, and did a simple transalation.  So, it
would seem that Poplog is a very forgiving system (you
don't need to know a lot of ancient Poplog lore to get
decent performance.)

I'm sure that the many Poplog experts on this list
will have little trouble identifying ways of improving
the performance of my simple implementations (and I
sincerely hope that they do!).  What I think is very
interesting is that Poplog performs so well,
considering that many of the best performers are at
their current scores because of the work of dozens of
developers tweaking and adjusting the programs until
they reached their current levels.

Regards,

-Brent