<story><title>Is Scheme Faster than C?</title><url>http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txt</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dkarl</author><text>This makes me so nostalgic.  Ah, to be back in school when the hardest thing I had to do was math, and I didn&apos;t have to worry about anyone wanting to modify my code or coming to me saying, &quot;Hey, dkarl, we just signed a huge contract, and part of what we promised is that a 2 in the hundreds place of the left operand will be treated as a 3 when we do multiplication for this customer.  What base?  I don&apos;t know, rebel base alpha.  I&apos;m just the project manager.  The product manager answers those kinds of questions.  And make sure it&apos;s configurable, because the customer has been going back and forth a bit about the specifics, and we don&apos;t think we&apos;ll be able to nail them down before we deploy.&quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Is Scheme Faster than C?</title><url>http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txt</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stcredzero</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Out of a class of about 15 students, only one
person beat me (and only barely), and he wrote significant portions of
his program directly in Assembly Language.  The next fastest after me
took nearly twice as long to do the same work.&lt;p&gt;...A runtime profile of my program revealed
that the majority of time was spent in the C routines &quot;malloc&quot; and
&quot;free.&quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;For all of the beginning programmers and most of the student programmers out there: Yes often a fast JIT VM might actually beat your C or get pretty close!  If you ever become a good programmer, then you can do much better than the JIT in key situations.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: There&apos;s a self evaluation method here for aspiring C programmers.  Start benchmarking your code against the same thing in LuaJIT.  You&apos;re not &quot;good&quot; until you know how to routinely beat it by a factor approaching 2.  And that&apos;s necessary, but not sufficient.</text></comment>