[CM] Performance of S7

[bil at ccrma.Stanford.EDU]

Thanks very much for the kind words about s7, and the comparison of s7 
and Guile 1.8.
I have wondered about real-world results -- I have my timing tests, and 
the standard
benchmarks (which I think are not at all representative of actual code),
and in those contexts, I believe s7 is faster than Guile 1.8.  I looked
at some of the TeXmacs scheme code, and notice you use modules and 
hygienic
macros.  The latter are not supported in s7, so I would expect the 
psyntax.pp
implementation to be very slow.  I don't think 100,000 lines is a 
problem --
s7test.scm has 104,000 lines, and runs in about a second, and I've 
loaded
million line programs without problem.  Hash table lookups on symbols 
should
be fast too, unless I've missed something.  Could you run TeXmacs under
callgrind and send me the results? -- something might jump out at me.
I downloaded TeXmacs, but I don't see the s7 code.