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by hondadriver 491 days ago
Reminds me of Greenspun's tenth rule of programming (also counts for Java, but this most probably predates it):

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

2 comments

Ritchie's Revenge: And this half is still faster than Common Lisp.
Only when adding UB exploits done by optimizing compiler backends.

I am old enough to remeber the days any junior Assembly programmer could easily outperform any machine code generated by the C compilers of the day.

SBCL (the most popular Common Lisp implementation) is pretty darn fast, being comparable to Java, Go or OCaml.

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

But still slow compared to a non-GC'd language. Walking over all the references of your program while its stopped is slow.
> Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

...including Common Lisp.