Re: Making Guile slower

[Marius Vollmer <mvo at zagadka dot ping dot de>]

Greg Harvey <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net> writes:

> Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.ping.de> writes:
> 
> > Is anyone worried about this change re performance?
> > 
> > 1999-12-10  Greg Harvey  <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net> (applied --12/10/99 gjb)
> > 
> > 	* smob.c (scm_smob_prehistory): initialize allocated smob
> > 
> > 	* tags.h: new tag: scm_tc16_allocated
> > 
> > 	* gc.c (scm_gc_for_newcell): set the car of the new cell
> > 	to scm_tc16_allocated
> > 	* pairs.h (SCM_NEWCELL): set the car to scm_tc16_allocated
> > 	(scm_gc_mark): mark allocated cells.
> > 
> > I am somewhat, because SCM_NEWCELL now seems to perform one more
> > operation.
> 
> Did you even think about what this is accomplishing before you started
> worrying about the performance or are you now just on a hunt to show
> that we're trying to make guile perform poorly?

Errm, I wrote this hastily, and I'm sorry that I gave the impression
of wanting to cause trouble again.  What really motivated me to bring
this up was that Mikael showed a slow down of Guile, and this was the
change that might have been a performance impact in my opinion.
Honest.

I really don't think that you guys do not care about the performance
of Guile.  The reason why I continued this discussion so stubbornly is
that it wasn't clear to me that Greg B understood the point I was
trying to make (together with and inspired by Mikael).  In my view you
took a chance with Guile's performance and stability but there wasn't
any real reason for that.  Guile might not be `finished' the same way
that bash is finished, say, but it still is worth it to not
gratitiously risk the existing state, in my view.

[ It might have helped to quickly note in the ChangeLog that this was
  a bugfix.  You should also change scm_debug_newcell, I think. ]