performance page

[Henry Cejtin]

I  just did a quick comparison of fib in C (which always passes all arguments
on the stack, but returns results in a register) with  MLton,  and  MLton  is
still  20%  slower  than  C (and this with overflow checking turned off).  In
this case the extra overhead is two extra compares  of  registers  (%ebp  and
%esp)  to  the  values  in  memory  locations.  One of these is for the heap.
Note, there is no allocation in the loop.  Is the other some interrupt check?