Latest in the Quest for Speed

I found an interesting post which claims that Chicken is a bit faster than Gambit on floating-point code. There's a paper by Brad Lucier which talks about using Gambit to make a PDE solver, which would seem to refute this (Chicken doesn't achieve C speeds on numerics), but I suspect that his sparse matrix-vector multiply was memory-bound, so the speed of the code didn't matter too much.

In any case, by my measurements, Bigloo is much faster than either Chicken or Gambit on floating-point code, so it's still my choice. I would love to find a syntax-case implementation for it, but define-macro is probably just as good for my uses. I posted a message about my attempts (and failures) getting dynamic loading to work with Bigloo. If I could just make that work, it would make my development much easier (it's a real pain to have to recompile the REPL every time I want to define a new class or whatever).