Speed versus C

[Stephen Weeks]

> What is MLton's efficience versus C?

Here are the times in seconds for a few small benchmarks on my 400 MhZ
Pentium II.  For benchmarks that use arrays, I have also included the
time when compiling with the -unsafe flag, which turns off bounds
checking.

		gcc -O2		mlton		mlton -unsafe
		-------		-----		-------------
fft		18.69		31.66		28.69
fib		 7.44		 9.97
matrix mult	 2.65		13.27		 6.15
quicksort	17.69		27.80		20.94
tak		15.86		21.99

As you can see mlton -unsafe is within a factor of 2 on all the
benchmarks except matrix multiply, which is 2.3 times slower.

> P.S. As I understand the CPS (continuation passing style ) used to implement
> SML/NJ will be abandoned as it did not produce small and fast standalone
> executables

I don't think that CPS is entirely the cause of this.  Although, I do
believe that their use of the heap for allocating stack frames does
slow them down.  As to size, I think they just haven't gone to enough
effort to clean up the exported heaps.

> Is MLton portable to other OSes?

Yes, but it hasn't been done yet.  Right now, there is a Windows port
underway by anoq@hardcoreprocessing.com, using a crosscompiler from
Linux (http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/Xmingw32/).  He just
started, so I'm not sure how it will turn out.

I am not aware of any other porting efforts.  The current focus of our
development efforts are improving the performance with an X86 native
backend and adding functionality.