Update on Gambit-C Scheme benchmarks

Thanks to some helpful comments from a few people on my previous post about Gambit-C Scheme, I rebuilt and ran (with a larger minimum heap size specified) those few benchmarks I was bothered pulling off their site and the shootout site for SBCL (which is a very fast Common Lisp implementation I'm interested in using as a kind of reference).

The results in general are much better:

time ./fannkuch -:m20000 11 > output_fannkuch

real 0m9.931s
user 0m9.465s
sys 0m0.172s

time ./fasta -:m20000 25000000 > output_fasta

real 0m29.843s
user 0m25.220s
sys 0m2.700s

time ./binary-trees -:m20000 16 > output-binary-trees

real 0m2.770s
user 0m2.581s
sys 0m0.089s

time ./pidigits -:m20000 2500 > output 
real 0m3.322s
user 0m3.093s
sys 0m0.110s

A range of improvement is apparent, with binary-trees benefitting a lot and pidigits not really getting much better.
I picked a 20 meg heap because a) it seems wasteful for individual programs to reserve (and probably waste) huge chunks of memory, if you're running a lot of programs b) when I tried higher values up to 50 megs on the fasta benchmark, it was faster, but only by another .2 seconds or so; about 1-2%... and c) Most other languages, and in this case SBCL, don't seem to request more than about 20 megs for their initial heap size either.

Of note is the fact that the prebuilt version produced slightly faster code than the version I compiled myself, specifying the optimisations mentioned in the INSTALL.txt document. Not sure why... These numbers are for the Gambit I compiled myself, and I didn't feel like dumping it and re-installing the prebuilt version just yet.

Anyway, these are nice results!