Thanks for posting your results! This is really curious:

(time (eval '(defun somefunction () (ps (form)))))

672.596 seconds of real time

I'm not sure what's going on here. The two versions of 'ps' essentially do the same macroexpansion. As a matter of fact, the new one conses slightly more.

My little test (form was a function call with 5000 dummy arguments) did not exhibit such a long eval time for the defun. I think what may be happening is that 'concatenate' in SBCL now (sometime between 1.0.22, which I'm running, and 1.0.29) has a compiler macro that attempts to do constant string concatenation at compile-time. That's just a guess though.

; ps with write-to-string (time (eval '(defun somefunction () (ps (form)))))

Evaluation took: 32.524 seconds of real time

That's a lot of time. How many tokens does your code have?

What I need to do is figure out the best way available across most implementations to spit out strings (which just might be 'write-to-string') and to push that down to the Parenscript printer, instead of having it return a list of strings. That should close the gap between 'ps' and 'ps*' and provide a big improvement in speed, and if streams are involved, let you direct the output of Parenscript directly into one.

Vladimir

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Kelly.P.McDonald@gmail.com wrote:

Vladimir,

sorry about the truncated post earlier.

I'm using sbcl 1.0.29

here are my results:

(time (eval '(defun somefunction () (ps* '(form)))))

Evaluation took: 0.007 seconds of real time 0.004000 seconds of total run time (0.004000 user, 0.000000 system) 57.14% CPU 9 forms interpreted 3 lambdas converted 7,264,237 processor cycles 625,872 bytes consed

(time (somefunction))

Evaluation took: 0.555 seconds of real time 0.456028 seconds of total run time (0.412025 user, 0.044003 system) [ Run times consist of 0.300 seconds GC time, and 0.157 seconds non-GC time. ] 82.16% CPU 85 lambdas converted 555,544,368 processor cycles 6,404,784 bytes consed

; ps with concatenate (time (eval '(defun somefunction () (ps (form)))))

Evaluation took: 672.596 seconds of real time 517.380334 seconds of total run time (501.967371 user, 15.412963 system) [ Run times consist of 7.004 seconds GC time, and 510.377 seconds non-GC time. ] 76.92% CPU 9 forms interpreted 3 lambdas converted 3,125,982,714,733 processor cycles 5 page faults 560,010,640 bytes consed

(time (somefunction))

Evaluation took: 0.651 seconds of real time 0.548034 seconds of total run time (0.544034 user, 0.004000 system) 84.18% CPU 657,341,464 processor cycles 826,672 bytes consed

; ps with write-to-string (time (eval '(defun somefunction () (ps (form)))))

Evaluation took: 32.524 seconds of real time 29.861866 seconds of total run time (29.461841 user, 0.400025 system) [ Run times consist of 1.129 seconds GC time, and 28.733 seconds non-GC time. ] 91.82% CPU 9 forms interpreted 91 lambdas converted 65,799,376,447 processor cycles 135,977,120 bytes consed

(time (somefunction)) Evaluation took: 0.004 seconds of real time 0.004000 seconds of total run time (0.004000 user, 0.000000 system) 100.00% CPU 3,869,482 processor cycles 200,144 bytes consed

A huge improvement, and I understand what is going on much better. I had been using compile-script previously.

Thanks, Kelly