RE: [Sisc-users] SISC vs Kawa

[Dominique B. <dom...@nu...>]

> SISC will in general be slower than Kawa, though it can be faster,
> and for certain things (like continuations, which combined with
> serialization seem to be the hot place for using SISC), it is more
> than an order of magnitude faster.  Its important to test 
> the functionality you'll actually be using.

I second that. I have chosen Kawa over SISC strictly for performance reasons
based on a benchmark for some typical code in my application domain. But
YMMV based on YOUR application domain. And confess that I sometimes miss TCO
and true continuations... So it's always a matter of compromises.

> SISC is more complete in more ways than just standards 
> compliance.  It 
> also has a much more complete standard library, far more SRFI 
> support. 
> It tries to be a complete Scheme environment, rather than
> a way to write Scheme code which is compilable as JVM bytecodes.  For
> that reason, Kawa relies much more on one calling into Java libraries
> than SISC.  

I agree with Scott. Many more SRFIs are available with SISC when compared to
Kawa. 

Another interesting aspect of Kawa is the ability to use a Java debugger to
single-step the code, inspect local variables, etc. This is possible, for
example, in Eclipse with the SchemeScript plugin
(http://schemeway.sourceforge.net), which offers some support for Kawa.


Dominique Boucher