Reversible versus Irreversible Machines: Experimental Results

The Geometry of Interaction semantics introduced by Girard provides a new way of understanding the reduction process in the-calculus where the computation steps are linear and reversible. Moreover, this can be trivially implemented to give a simple compilation technique: the Geometry of Interaction Machine. At the cost of introducing global operations (irreversible copying and discarding) Danos and Regnier have shown a correspondence with Krivine's environment machine. In this paper we report on experimental results for the respective performances of these two implementations to try to judge the relative merits of reversible versus irreversible computations.