I've been working a bit on rainbow optimisation lately, mostly to get welder up to an approximately usable speed. The bottleneck in welder is tokenising arc source code, so the tokeniser in parser.arc has been the target of my benchmarks.
On my mac, arc3 performs about 3 times faster than rainbow, which itself is now performing 5 times faster that it was a few weeks ago.
I used to use a prime-number generator to compare ... curiously rainbow performs slightly better for small numbers (find all primes under 10000, 413ms vs 465), but worse for large numbers (find all primes under 100000, 8.4s vs 7.4s). This particular generator uses continuations; there are probably other ways of writing it to exploit weaknesses in either java or scheme to get different results.
Try it for yourself... you really need to be running timing tests against code that you want to run, since different code may end up being faster or slower.
