From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: tfb@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2016 23:53:00 +0000
Subject: [TUHS] Early Unix function calls: expensive?
In-Reply-To: <20160103233543.GA10102@minnie.tuhs.org>
References: <20160103233543.GA10102@minnie.tuhs.org>
Message-ID: <76BC99D5-A8C4-4F8B-8D7D-C621CBD18238@tfeb.org>



> On 3 Jan 2016, at 23:35, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> Does anybodu have a measure of the expense of function calls under Unix
> on either platform?
> 

I don't have the reference to hand, but one of the things Lisp implementations (probably Franz Lisp in particular) did on the VAX was not to use CALLS: they could do this because they didn't need to interoperate with C except at known points (where they would use the C calling conventions).  This change made a really significant difference to function call performance and meant that on call-heavy code Lisp was often very competitive with C.

I can look up the reference (or, really, ask someone who remembers).

The VAX architecture and its performance horrors must have killed DEC, I guess.