As soon as I saw the title, I thought of the streetfighter character, but this was actually an interesting read on a programming language, I had never heard of before
The slogan I've proposed for the language is "Guile goes with everything." Because Guile was designed from the outset to run embedded or standalone, and to transpile other extension languages to Scheme or a Scheme-compatible representation, I think that fitting. See: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/guiles-theme-goes-with-everyt...
I think the Guile community of yore would have no idea what Street Fighter was but now we should embrace it as long as Capcom doesn't get mad.
I have such mixed feelings about dynamically typed languages. I've designed a whole pile of hobby programming languages, and dynamically typed languages are at least an order of magnitude simpler to design and for users to learn and start using. At the same time, they inevitably seem to lead to user stories like this where a user really does know exactly what types they're working with and wants the language to know…
stanza (https://lbstanza.org/) is a very interesting experiment in designing for gradual types rather than retrofitting them onto a dynamic language
You probably shouldn’t do those things. The point of a high level language is to not have to think about such details. If you can’t get the performance you need, you should use a different tool, instead of trying to circumvent implicit limitations.
These sorts of optimizations can and should be handled by a (sufficiently smart (tm)) compiler. Common Lisp/SBCL is usually sufficiently smart. I know not everyone likes Common Lisp, but at least I would have tested it with something more performant that Guile, like Chicken Scheme (my favorite!), Chez Scheme, etc. I like Guile and its purpose as a universal scripting language. However, its performance issues are well…
Guile has come a long way in the past decade or so! I think your info is quite out of date. Guile's compiler performs a number of state of the art optimizations. It compiles to bytecode so native code compilers like Chez win the race, naturally. The JIT is pretty good, though! Native compilation is on the roadmap for Guile, but maybe somewhat surprisingly we're getting AOT compilation to WebAssembly first. https://sp…
It's still much much slower than SBCL which is not surprising given the time & effort that went into the latter. User-guided optimizations (type declarations, stack allocation, intrinsics, machine code generation) in SBCL are also more flexible and better integrated.
As soon as I saw the title, I thought of the streetfighter character, but this was actually an interesting read on a programming language, I had never heard of before
A prominent use of Guile is as the configuration language for Guix, GNU's version of Nix
It's the official GNU extension language, so it's fairly widely used in the GNU world I think.
It's also the language of the init system/service manager on GuixSD (the full OS distribution based on Guix), GNU Shepherd (a.k.a. dmd), and IIRC their initrd runs a Guile program instead of a shell script.
Guile has come a long way in the past decade or so! I think your info is quite out of date. Guile's compiler performs a number of state of the art optimizations. It compiles to bytecode so native code compilers like Chez win the race, naturally. The JIT is pretty good, though! Native compilation is on the roadmap for Guile, but maybe somewhat surprisingly we're getting AOT compilation to WebAssembly first. https://sp…
It's still much much slower than SBCL which is not surprising given the time & effort that went into the latter. User-guided optimizations (type declarations, stack allocation, intrinsics, machine code generation) in SBCL are also more flexible and better integrated.
I have such mixed feelings about dynamically typed languages. I've designed a whole pile of hobby programming languages, and dynamically typed languages are at least an order of magnitude simpler to design and for users to learn and start using. At the same time, they inevitably seem to lead to user stories like this where a user really does know exactly what types they're working with and wants the language to know…
I'm happy with dynamic languages for almost everything I do and generally do not want to sacrifice flexibility, which is the price to pay for a static type system. However, certain parts of a program become more crystalline over time, whether for performance or correctness reasons, and being able to express those parts using a static type system makes a lot of sense. PreScheme [0] is an example of a statically typed Scheme that composes with the host Scheme. I'd like to see more work in this direction as Scheme already works well as a multi-paradigm language.
If you want to read just an enormous amount of well-written bloggage about optimizing Guile Scheme, this is the spot: https://wingolog.org Andy Wingo is the maintainer and I get a kick out of everything he posts.
Andy's blog is on another level. He's also leading the Hoot project to compile Guile to WebAssembly and I work with him on that and try to absorb whatever compiler knowledge I can while doing so.
These sorts of optimizations can and should be handled by a (sufficiently smart (tm)) compiler. Common Lisp/SBCL is usually sufficiently smart. I know not everyone likes Common Lisp, but at least I would have tested it with something more performant that Guile, like Chicken Scheme (my favorite!), Chez Scheme, etc. I like Guile and its purpose as a universal scripting language. However, its performance issues are well…
Isn't Racket the 'default' Scheme? (Even though it's no longer called Scheme.)
I don't think there's a real 'default' Scheme, like Chez is probably the implementation which generates the fastest code, but if I'm not mistaken it only implements the R6RS spec, Guile is quite performant and supports both R6RS and R7RS Small, Chicken has a bunch of libraries (the 'eggs'), but I think it's R5RS (I may be wrong), and of course GNU/MIT Scheme is what you want to follow along with MIT publications working in Scheme (like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, and The Art of the Propagator). There's also Gauche, which I believe is the most conformant implementation to the various Colour Dockets for R7RS Large (Gerbil may also be fully conformant).