Re: performance

["Ian Bicking" <bickiia@earlham.edu>]

This is just a general response to the people who want debugging 
turned off by default:

I think it's insane to ship Guile with debugging turned off.  What self-
respecting interactive language turns off debugging by default?  
Compiled languages, sure, but that's everything that Guile is *not*.  
Guile is meant to be a compliment to compiled languages.  Guile 
is meant to be interactive.

It probably makes sense to have debugging turned off for non-
interactive code (this does not include code loaded from an 
interactive session, of course).  Debugging will seldom be of any 
use in these cases.

But during an interactive session speed is generally not very 
important -- programs are bound more by the time for the 
user/programmer to write expressions and read the output than by 
the processor.

Bugs are an inevitable part of even very simple code.  Guile's 
Scheme (rather than the C interface) *should* be directed towards 
the non-developer.  The non-developer is someone who maybe isn't 
great at Scheme, who is experimenting with the application, and 
who wants to try their hand at a little scripting.  That person needs 
debugging turned on.  The expert knows how to turn it on and off 
just fine.  If Scheme code is used as a glue for the application itself 
then the glue would be non-interactive anyway.

People who do performance measurements are such a tiny 
consituency of the people who would use Guile that it is quite silly 
that Guile should be modified for their benefit.



--
Ian Bicking <bickiia@earlham.edu>