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Re: Is guile byte-code compiled?


Michael Schuerig wrote:
> At 12:25 Uhr +0200 23.05.1999, Mikael Djurfeldt wrote:
> > Since Guile is supposed to be an application scripting language you
> > don't want it to be too large.  If you use BC, you need both a BC
> > compiler and a BC interpreter, which increases the size of the
> > system.  (Look at Scheme48 or RScheme.  They are really huge compared
> > to Guile.)
 
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but there might be an additional issue. The
> current interpreter ensures that scripts are distributed as source. I
> have the idea that this is one significant influence on the culture
> around a language; just witness the differences between the Perl and
> Java communities. Perl is -- almost by necessity -- much more about
> sharing code than Java is.


I think that this is a valid point.  However, I think it is inevitable that
some will try to use obfuscation via compilation to make things
proprietary.

Since you can now compile Perl to C, people have begun to use that not
because it is faster (it usually isn't noticeably faster) but because they
want to obfuscate to proprietarize.

I don't think we can beat this trend here---we should do whatever makes
Guile code run faster.

(Of course, that may be to continue using only the current memoizing
interpreter.  :)

Does Hobbit produce substantial speed-ups?  (setting aside the issue that it
accepts a slightly different language)
-- 
         -  bkuhn@ebb.org  -  Bradley M. Kuhn  -  bkuhn@gnu.org  -
                          http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn

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