The author presents tips on optimizing performance in Guile, a Scheme dialect, particularly useful for game programming. Avoiding allocations and preferring monomorphic procedures are key strategies. Surprisingly, Guile allocates heap space for floats, impacting performance. By specializing numeric operations and leveraging Guile’s advanced compiler, unboxing can be achieved, improving computational efficiency dramatically. Tools like profile and disassemble help identify problematic code for optimization. An example optimizing variadic arguments showcases a 17x speed improvement and reduced garbage collection. For example, by using case-lambda, common cases can be optimized without sacrificing flexibility. The author’s enthusiasm for Guile shines through as they navigate the complexities of optimization.
https://dthompson.us/posts/optimizing-guile-scheme.html