One of the tiresome things that Lispers keep hearing from the misinformed is that Lisp systems are too slow for production work. Here’s a very impressive counter example to that notion.
JCG over at the Racket Users forum reports that he rewrote a 2,000 line C++ program in Racket Scheme and saw a 20% speed increase. More importantly, I think, is that new server was only 700 lines of Scheme.
So faster, shorter. What’s not to like? JCG does say that the memory footprint is significantly larger (300 megs versus 60) so there is a downside. At least there’s a downside if you’re worried about a 300 MB memory footprint. These days, most of us probably aren’t.