

Proof that Scheme will never be faster than C - etal
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/conteq.pdf

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krig
It looks like a joke to me. The program always just calls exit(0); straight
away if the main function is the expected one, which is why it's so fast. All
the rest is just noise to hide that. All he seems to be saying is that the
competition could be won by implementing fastroot() as just calling exit(0).

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etal
Thanks. The choice of ;=) as the operator did make me suspicious.

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etal
Andy Wingo linked this on his blog, with this cryptic title and no
elaboration. I read it, but I'm not sure I got it. What's the deal?

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apgwoz
This isn't really proof that Scheme will be faster than C, and in fact doesn't
really mention Scheme at all, except to show that it is a language that
supports call-with-current-continuation as a primitive operation.

What I got from the paper is that using continuations with intensional
equality (that is to say their contents are the same) can be used to
dramatically speed up a program. And so, a primitive way to create intensional
equal continuations would be a potentially worthwhile primitive for a
language.

