Hacker News Reader

More than 10 years ago Jeffrey Mark Siskind posted micro benchmark [1] of his aggressively optimizing Stalin Scheme compiler versus then-current GCC. Stalin produced code 21 time faster than GCC.

I do not know why this fact remains so little-known.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9801ba2edd...

View on HN

Note the comparison is to C, not C++. The runtime improvement came from aggressive inlining.

I'm pretty sure that C++ code (which allows templates, function objects etc) can be written to do the same.

Of course, then we'll get into discussions about whether the C++ code is "idiomatic", requires "wizardry" etc.

The biggest win I see for JIT'd dynamic languages is their ability to optimize across source files. I wish C++ had the capacity to slurp in ALL of a project's C/C++ files and compile it one pass.

In these days of 16G developer desktops, is this an unreasonable demand? :)

In fact C++ is usually slower than C because parsing and comprehending it is so damned hard that compiler writers are satisfied when they can get that far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com