R7RS benchmarks for Gerbil

These are the results for Gerbil v0.18.2-pre (pre-release of v0.18.2), Gambit v4.9.5-130 (same as the Gerbil pin), and Racket v8.12.

This is based on ecraven's benchmarks, which seem unmaintained.

The benchmarks were run on a Dell XPS 13-9320 laptop.

Each benchmark was run 3 times, and I kept the best value.

Gerbil Variants

• Gerbil R7RS safe is Gerbil R7RS in its default safe mode, with separate compilation.
• Gerbil R7RS unsafe is Gerbil R7RS with the main module compiled with (declare (not safe)).
• Gerbil idiomatic is a variant of the program, written in idiomatic Gerbil with type annotations. This is the code you would write today if you cared about performance, not the benchmark code you inherited from 30 years ago. Note: I haven't writen idiomatic programs for all the benchmarks yet and some are so minimal that plain Scheme will do.

Notes

• Both Gerbil and Gambit are tuned with -:m64M, which gives an initial/minimum heap size of 64M.
• See also the older results for Gerbil v0.18.
• Regression Analysis for results relative to the v0.18 benchmarks:
  • Gerbil R7RS safe
  • Gerbil R7RS unsafe
• Result comparison:
• For result comparison between Gerbil R7RS safe and Gerbil R7RS unsafe see here
• For result comparison between Gerbil R7RS safe and vanilla Gambit (safe) see here
• For result comparison between Gerbil R7RS safe and Racket R7RS see here
• For result comparison between Gerbil idiomatic and Gerbil R7RS safe see here
• For result comparison between Gerbil idiomatic and Racket R7RS see here
• Many of the original benchmarks are tuned for Chez (or Chez is tuned for them), and by extension Racket; the idiomatic programs show that optimizing them for Gerbil (and by extension Gambit) can produce highly performant code.

Benchmark Modifications

There have been some modifications in the source relative to ecraven's benchmarks. Specifically:

The conform, maze and ray benchmarks have been modified to use records defined with define-record-type instead of vectors.

R7RS has record types for a reason and it is completely unreasonable to use vectors instead of records in the year 2024..

Results