Re:Chez Scheme as the Racket VM
by steinuil on Wednesday February 15, 2017 @10:41PM
(#13657620)
Speed is probably not your most pressing concern if you're using Scheme, I think.
Moreover, Racket has the best ecosystem out of all the schemes, with lots of high quality and maintained libraries and a massive standard library, and it's not only a language, but also a platform for creating DSLs fully integrated with its IDE, DrRacket.
Also, Racket can create standalone binaries (though they don't make programs any faster).
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And in terms of speed, Racket is generally quite a lot faster than Python. I remember the days when rhetorically people almost assumed that poor execution speed meant higher-level abstractions that translated to greater developer productivity. Slow execution practically became a fitness function (I'm looking at the commentary during the early days of Ruby and Rails here).
But with Racket you've got high-level, comparable-to-Python abstraction combined with way better performance today, and even better performance tomorrow. Plus as a bonus, the typed story is good.
EDIT: In summary, even if performance wasn't your objective, you're still punching well above comparably high-level languages like Python.
> But with Racket you've got high-level, comparable-to-Python abstraction
Racket's abstraction is indeed high level but in no way comparable to Python. Racket's homoiconicity and syntactic abstraction put it leagues above Python in that regards.
> Plus as a bonus, the typed story is good.
Seriously considering Typed Racket at this point. I like Python, but lately I've been bumping up against the limitations of its type system. (There's only so much you can say about a type in Python.)
Re:Chez Scheme as the Racket VM
by throwaway7645 on Friday February 17, 2017 @06:45AM
(#13667549)
How will it get even better besides occasional tweaks here and there?
The original article describes moving from Racket's present VM to the Chez Scheme VM. As linked elsewhere in this thread, the performance benchmarks for Chez Scheme are remarkable. My other comment muses about the possibility that Racket will be able to capitalize on the performance gains afforded by moving to a much faster VM.