12. Retired Myths

12 Retired Myths

We belive that the truth finally has caught with the following, retired myths.

12.1 Myth: Funs are Slow

Funs used to be very slow, slower than apply/3. Originally, funs were implemented using nothing more than compiler trickery, ordinary tuples, apply/3, and a great deal of ingenuity.

But that is history. Funs was given its own data type in R6B and was further optimized in R7B. Now the cost for a fun call falls roughly between the cost for a call to a local function and apply/3.

12.2 Myth: List Comprehensions are Slow

List comprehensions used to be implemented using funs, and in the old days funs were indeed slow.

Nowadays, the compiler rewrites list comprehensions into an ordinary recursive function. Using a tail-recursive function with a reverse at the end would be still faster. Or would it? That leads us to the myth that tail-recursive functions are faster than body-recursive functions.