From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 14:05:09 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] lisp challenge In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 16 Feb 2018 13:01:14 -0800." <20180216210114.GA27574@mcvoy.com> References: <20180216210114.GA27574@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20180216220524.3B9A4156E80B@mail.bitblocks.com> On Fri, 16 Feb 2018 13:01:14 -0800 Larry McVoy 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.