[cl-faq] whence "Lisp is slow" myth? one possible answer

[Pascal Bourguignon]

Gary Klimowicz writes:
> But wait, there's more. Lisp pioneered dynamic memory management with its
> trivial ability to create dynamic memory (CONS), and its garbage collection
> facility. Since these had no native counterpart in most other languages at
> the time (again, the 70s and 80s), it was never a fair comparison. Each C
> programmer generally had to manage their own memory allocation and
> deallocation, quite specifically for the problem at hand. Lisp's facilities
> here were much more general, and consequently, slower. Couple that with the
> original stop-everything-and-collect-garbage model of the original
> implementations, one could easily believe that Lisp was just inherently
> slow.

Even worse.  At the time lisp offered dynamically allocated data
structures, the usual programming paradigm was 100% purely statically
allocated data.  (eg. in FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL, etc).  PL/1 had
pointers but came one or two computer generations later (IBM 360 vs
704/709 of LISP).

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The entire physical universe,
including this product, may one day collapse back into an
infinitesimally small space. Should another universe subsequently
re-emerge, the existence of this product in that universe cannot be
guaranteed.