Current mood:	impressed
Entry tags:	prolog

YAP Prolog — Fast!
I tried YAP Prolog today, a Edinburgh-style Prolog implementation written entirely in C (as opposed to SWI-Prolog, for example, which is itself partially in Prolog). The website claims that YAP exhibits exceptional performance and is at least as fast as, if not faster than, other well-known implementations of the language. I tried testing this by running my version of the Porter Stemming Algorithm through it. It took only .6 seconds to process a megabyte of text, compared to 3.4 in SWI-Prolog (both using an Athlon64 3200+ in 32-bit Windows XP)! This only tests basic rule matching and list manipulation capabilities, but that's still an impressive difference. I'll still stick with SWI for most things because I find it more featureful and user-friendly, and I usually work with small enough data sets that I don't notice the processing time, but the YAP developers deserve a pat on the back.