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by noloblo 1211 days ago
Thanks between clojure sbcl racket and scheme which is the fastest language of am lisps?
2 comments

If you are referring to fastest in terms of wall & CPU time running. Without spending a lot of time optimizing your code yourself, I suspect SBCL would take the crown for vast majority of cases. If you do hyper optimize, the gap with scheme largely closes (sometime scheme wins, sometimes SBCL). So I'd go with SBCL if all else is the same feature wise to you. That said, the last serious benchmark I did of lisps was ~2010 so optimization may have changed since then and of course they were not very rigorus benchmarks (just my compute-bound workload at the time, that primarily boiled down to mostly integer ops). Debian language benchmarks game has some benchmarks written for sbcl and racket that may be good for comparing implementations yourself if interested. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
SBCL, probably. Scheme would be a close second depending on the implementation (Chicken, Gerbil or other compile-to-C impls.) Racket and Clojure are closer in performance to scripting languages like Python.
In the TechEmpower benchmarks, Clojure is about 2.75x slower than Java, while Python is 5.59x slower.

The fastest composite Python "framework" is uvicorn at 17.9% of the fastest run in Java (officefloor). The fastest Clojure run is Aleph at 36.4%.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&l=z...

About SBCL, I get conflicting results. The Benchmarks Game shows it roughly as fast as Java for many problems:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

But here it's significantly worse than the Clojure runs, likely due to the slow DB bindings (the other test types show it roughly in line with Clojure; though it uses a "Stripped"/unrealistic HTTP implementation):

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&l=z...

I am not sure which Lisp implementation is used; is it SBCL? Does this file speak to you?

https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/73eb...

There is a fun blog series about comparison and tweaks of the same problem between java, rust and CL. I will link only the last part of the series[1], but the general take is that SBCL performs comparably to a heavily optimized java implementation, and can even hold a candle to rust and java on short runs.

[1] https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revenge_of_lisp-part-2.htm...