[TUHS] lisp challenge

[bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2018 13:01:14 -0800 Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
Larry McVoy writes:
> So people have called me on the claim that lisp is not fast.  Here's a 
> rebuttal.
> 
> Please write a clone of GNU grep in lisp to demonstrate that the claim
> that lisp is slower that C is false.
> 
> Best of luck and I'll be super impressed if you can get even remotely
> close without dropping into C or assembler.  If you do get close, I 
> will with draw my claim, stand corrected, point future "lisp is slow"
> people at the lisp-grep, and buy you dinner and/or drinks.

If you want to do more of an apples to apples comparison, you
should pick a brand new problem not known to be solved in
either C or Lisp so that both sides start at the same point!

I do think that if you consider just the raw performance as
the sole metric, C will almost always win.  After all it is
sort of a portable assembly language & you can compile
programs in most language to C. But in the real world many
other factors matter too.  So to make the contest a bit more
fair, you should put a time limit on the effort.