As I have no doubt that it is possible to create an Arc implementation that delivers fast execution, it is precisely the socio-political issue that I intended to address in opening this thread.
As long as Arc is implemented in MzScheme, the best it can do is asymptotically approach MzScheme's performance. The discussion in this thread suggests that Arc will not forever be implemented in this way, so the limitation will be lifted. Just how much interest there is in greased-lightning performance is not clear to me.
I'm an English professor who does various kinds of computational analysis on large text corpora (so things like string handling, XML, and regex are really important to me). I've been known to write programs that take three weeks to run in Java, so I'm always looking for ways to make my programs fast without resorting to C. Nothing against C. It's one of my favorite languages. It's just not a lot of fun for string processing.
Basically, I always want to go high and fast with my languages, and that's one of the reasons I like Lisp. It's a super high level language, but (in my usage patterns) it outperforms languages like Ruby (which I adore) and Java (which I find increasingly annoying).
Now, my particular usage is perhaps a bit obscure, but it may generalize to other areas. I can't believe I'm the only one doing lots of text processing who wants a fast, high level language. In the end "web application programming" is really just a special case of text processing, so it may align with PG's goals at some more fundamental level.
