Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH][5] numbers integration

[Jörg F. Wittenberger]

Am 11.02.2015 um 13:09 schrieb Felix Winkelmann:
>>>> Personally I'd be more than happy to take the performance
>>>> hit on this so long as I can rely on fx operations and/or
>>>> (declare fixnum-arithmetic) to recover the original performance.
>>>
>>> You can; I didn't change any of those.  The "fixnum mode" probably
>>> still works, too (as in "(declare fixnum)"), but I didn't test it.
>>
> 
> I recommend to get rid of "fixnum-mode" - this brings up serious
> problems in code that uses external libraries, similar to the case
> when non-numbers code uses libraries that use numbers (and vice
> versa).  Fixnum-mode will assume that all numbers are fixnums (without
> checking for this). It is seldom used

Uhm. I'm using it a lot.  Together with type annotations.  Can't recall
any related problems in around ~80KLOC single project.  Seems not that
dangerous to me.

> accordingly, so nothing is won, because the speed advantage of fixnum
> math is that we can avoid the CPS calls and cram more numerical
> operations into a single CPS-converted function.

That's why I'm using it so much.

> Personally, I find the performance impact Peter reported unacceptable,
> and something has to be done about it before we commit on
> numbers-integration. But that's just _my_ opinion.

I'd regret loosing so much performance too.  At worst it might leave me
stuck with the 4.0 branch.

But if fixnum-mode is such a burden to keep avail, I'm short of any
recommendations.

Best

/Jörg