RE: Lisp, the secret weapon.

From: Gavin Thomas Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Date: Sat Apr 28 2001 - 19:02:15 PDT


> Maybe the reason viaweb was so fast in execution had
> nothing to do with being done in Lisp,
> but rather it might have been because all the people who knew lisp well
> enough also happened to be stellar programmers from MIT.

Could be... but in functional languages, there are a lot of
optimizations that you can perform, to the point where in
some cases, compiled functional code can be much faster than
C/C++.

For that matter, I wrote a SECDR machine a long time ago, and
the interpreter is so tiny is *easily* fits in CPU caches, so
it is really, really fast. I bet it'd eat most JAVA VMs for
lunch, even with a JIT.

That kinds of reminds me of FORTH... but that's probably
another thread ;-)



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