Trivial performance comparison of some Scheme interpreters

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Blog 2019/11/2

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Trivial performance comparison of some Scheme interpreters

Let's use a trivial (recursive) Fibonacci benchmark to compare the performance of a few Scheme interpreters.

(define (fib n) (if (< n 2) n (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))
(display (fib $n))
(newline)

Specifically, I was interested in looking at start-up time and overall throughput (actually, function-call overhead).

TL;DR

• 👍 Startup time: Elk, Chicken
• 👍 Throughput: Chez, Racket

Results

Overall results:

A close-up of the "knee" of the curve:

Start-up time

If we focus on small values of n, we can compare start-up time. Here, non-JIT'ed interpreters will perform well.

Throughput

If we focus on large values of n, we get a sense of the overall throughput (actually, the function-call overhead) of the interpreters. Here, the JIT'ed interpreters will perform well.

bench.sh

#!/bin/bash

# brew install guile gambit-scheme chezscheme mit-scheme chibi-scheme chicken racket scheme48 gerbil-scheme kawa

# note: you'll have to hack this script and execute kawa as "kawa -s".
for scheme in elk guile chez mit-scheme csi chibi-scheme scheme48 racket
do
    outfile="results-${scheme}.csv"
    echo "(fib n),time" > $outfile

    # do a dry-run to ensure vfs cache is warm
    $scheme >/dev/null 2>&1 <<EOF
(define (fib n) (if (< n 2) n (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))
(fib 10)
EOF

    for n in `seq 1 40`
    do
        echo "$scheme (fib $n)"
        { time $scheme <<EOF
(define (fib n) (if (< n 2) n (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))
(display (fib $n))
(newline)
EOF
        } 2>&1 | grep real | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's/^0m//' | sed 's/s$//' | sed "s/^/$n,/" >> $outfile
    done
done

@decalek oh jitter sounds very interesting!