RScheme

[Marc Wachowitz]

"Harvey J. Stein" <abel@netvision.net.il> wrote:
> A caveat - When I was judging it I was considering it as a scripting
> language, which is to say, I wanted to say #!/usr/bin/rscheme at the
> top of all my scripts

> I was concerned with things like startup
> times, memory footprint, etc.  And again, this was a while ago.

I've just tried RScheme's rstore binary of release 0.7.1 and Bash 2.00.0(1)
with stdin and stdout redirected to /dev/null, and another process already
executing the respective binary (just waiting for input), which seems to be
a reasonable comparison of startup times for frequently used shells. Looking
at the best values over several runs, the user times are almost the same, and
RScheme's system time is about 5 times as high as Bash's system time. Bash
consumed 672 KB, of which 512 KB have been shared, whereas RScheme consumed
2428 KB, of which 1076 KB have been shared. Sounds quite acceptable to me,
particularly if your scripts do something more interesting than executing an
application, and considering that much of what Bash would need to do via
external programs could be done from within RScheme, and could be compiled
where appropriate. Note that rstore contains some additional libraries, not
merely a basic Scheme system; thus it might be possible to reduce the size
and startup, though I didn't check it. (Measured with Linux 2.0.11, i486.)

>  > Btw, in case someone is still looking on some old ftp server: The lastest
>  > release is available from ftp://ftp.rosette.com/pub/rscheme/ (currently
>  > it's rs-0.7-0.1.tar.gz).
> 
> Actually, it's rs-0.7.1.tar.gz (released April 4th), which came after
> rs-0.7-0.9.tar.gz.

Right; I've confused the release number (I thought I had it remembered,
but obviously should have looked it up). Thanks for the correction.

-- Marc Wachowitz <mw@ipx2.rz.uni-mannheim.de>