[heisig]

Petalisp author here. I apologize that the README is somewhat lacking, but it wasn't me who posted this on HN.

As you may have seen on the commit history, a lot of exciting things have happened over the last few months. However, there are also a few stupid performance bugs left, so I am delaying the release of any performance numbers until those have been fixed. Otherwise, I fear that people will simply misinterpret the results.

Nevertheless, I can already state that the single-core performance of Petalisp programs is exactly like that of a C program - simply because Petalisp compiles its programs to C when possible. (Although I also have that long-term agenda of using sb-simd to reach that performance in pure CL some day.)

In addition, Petalisp is quite good at automatically parallelizing programs, and we already have most of the infrastructure for distributed and heterogeneous computing in place.

I will write a more detailed post for the HN crowd once I have reliable performance numbers and once I finished writing the documentation.

Feel free to ask me further questions.

[fredrikholm]

Thank you for responding. I wrongfully assumed that this was posted by yourself, if I had taken the time to understand that it was posted by someone else I wouldn't have made such a remark.

There's a trend where projects are marketed as 'blazingly fast', yet when benchmarked fall several orders of magnitude behind near optimal solutions. It's a knee jerk reaction of mine to call out when statements around performance are made without benchmarks.

Looking forward to seeing more about this project! I learned to program with CL way back when, makes me happy to see when people are working on big projects in it. Cheers!

[medo-bear]

This would be an exciting read. Im cretainly looking forward to it. Is there a read me for the required infrastructure setup in the works?

[heisig]

I am not sure what you mean by "required infrastructure setup". Installing Petalisp is a single call to (ql:quickload :petalisp) - assuming you have Quicklisp installed. If you also have a C compiler available, and an executable named cc pointing to that compiler, Petalisp will use that to speed up your codes further.

About the required hardware - anything that runs SBCL or CCL can also run Petalisp.