Lisps are not inherently slow. SBCL, Clojure and several Schemes are all much faster than most popular high-level languages (e.g. Python, Perl, Ruby...) while being at least as high-level.
Optimized code in SBCL may only be marginally slower than C when type declarations are used properly. The code is usually littered with type declarations and just as unsafe as C (things like integer overflows become possible, while Lisp would ordinarily promote an int to a bigint automatically). The nice thing is that you usually only have to do this to the inner loops. All the glue code can be written in potentially slow, but highly abstract idiomatic Lisp. This is similar to a common idiom in the C world, where a scripting language like Lua is embedded to make writing the parts that aren't speed-critical easier. Clojure, at best should be about as fast as Java, if you use type hints and unchecked math. A good Common Lisp will probably be slightly faster. Stalin, a highly-optimized subset of Scheme may be even faster. There's no magic number of cores where Clojure becomes faster than C+ +. If your C++ code is parallel and well-written, it will probably always be faster than Clojure. If your current code is single- threaded, but parallelizable and you have an 8-core machine, you might get faster results merely by using one of the operations from clojure.parallel. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
