> It is worth noting that eager, statically-typed languages like OCaml and F# > are many times faster than the other languages at this task. This is > precisely the forte of OCaml and F#, manipulating trees and graphs.
To be fair, it is also worth noting that both the OCaml and F# implementations have code generators that are much more advanced than the usual suspects in the Lisp world (save maybe for Allegro, with which I have no experience). The OCaml code generator is reknowned for producing good code. And of course, F# has the benefit of the CLR code generator, which is state of the art. I don't know why the ML-family language implementations tend to have better code generators, but they do. SML/NJ's register allocator is an iterated-coalescing implementation written by Appel himself. Meanwhile, SBCL's allocator is a simple heuristic implementation, which wouldn't have been state of the art even 25 years ago. MLton does a full suite of SSA-based optimizations. SBCL's doesn't even do peephole optimization. And of course the CLR does *everything* (with Microsoft's $$$, there is no excuse for it not to). PS) I don't mean to pick on SBCL here. I'm just using it as an example because it's state of the art as far as free Lisp compilers go. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
