Someone asked recently for help on Reddit[1] with a Racket performance issue. The problem was they they were constructing a large list by appending many short lists repeatedly; their code was calling `(set! result (append result shortList))` in a loop and this was slow (unsurprisingly.)
While trying to help them out, it occurred to me that this person was perhaps translating a program from Python to Racket, maybe to evaluate Racket. The problem is that list-append operations are efficient in Python, but the natural corresponding choice in Racket, the `append` function, is not. I wonder how many people are in a similar situation, where they try to convert a Python program to Racket, see that the performance is bad, and conclude that Racket is slow -- Every time Racket is mentioned on Reddit or HN there is at least one person mentioning that Racket is slow and sadly they may even have their own data to prove it. Given the recent discussion in this group about promoting Racket, I am wondering what can we do to help this category of people? These might be persons who never ask for help in any forum, after all the Racket documentation is good enough to help anyone who is willing to read it. One improvement that I can think of is to add a performance description to each function that operates on the basic data structures (lists, vectors, hash-tables) What do others think? Alex. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Racket/comments/am5r2w/how_to_read_a_file_linebyline_efficiently/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
