
GNU Guile 2.9.1 (beta) released – support for JIT [x86_64 as of now] - agumonkey
https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu-guile-291-beta-released.html
======
bjoli
I have been seeing speedups ranging from 2-6x in all my old project Euler
solutions (1-100), which is a one-sided benchmark, but still impressive.

No slowdowns on anything that runs longer than 0.05s.

------
jammygit
It says that Guile is an implementation of Scheme. Would that make it
appropriate for a trip through the SICP?

~~~
gnulinux
I'm a huge fan of Guile, I think it's the best Scheme implementation out
there. Chez is faster and MIT is more standard but Guile offers really amazing
extensibility tools I couldn't find anywhere else. It's very easy to embed C
in scheme (ffi call) or embed scheme in C using Guile. It's like Lua but I
personally prefer Guile as the C api is better imho although they're very
comparable. Whenever I write a C program I make it scriptable using Guile.
Imho a very essential tool of a C programmer. It supports other languages too
but I never tried them (elisp and JavaScript) since I don't care for js and
kinda dislike elisp (even though I'm an emacs user).

~~~
armitron
Lua (LuaJIT really) is battle-tested to the extreme and utterly reliable at
this point (it's used all over the place, including in the game industry).

Guile is still very much focused on Linux and has well-documented issues on
other platforms (including Windows and macOS) not to mention absence of
developers and users. For all the talk about it being the "official"
extensibility language of the GNU project, my understanding is that Guile has
a minimal userbase.

Finally, having used both Guile and LuaJIT, I have to say that LuaJIT FFI
blows Guile FFI out of the water. It's so much better in every possible way. I
haven't tested Guile 2.9.1 but I wouldn't think it comes close to LuaJIT in
performance either. Embedding Lua or LuaJIT is a piece of cake too, since it
has no dependencies whatsoever. Guile loses here too:

    
    
        $ port deps luajit
        luajit @2.0.5_0 has no dependencies.
    
        $ port deps guile
        Full Name: guile @2.2.4_0
        Build Dependencies:   gsed
        Library Dependencies: readline, gettext, libiconv, libtool, gmp, libunistring, boehmgc, libffi, ncurses, pkgconfig
    

So, empirically speaking, I don't see Guile as an alternative to Lua. It
simply can't compete.

