On Mar 14, 2009, at 3:29 , Paul Sanders wrote:
How about perl instead? (I don't think egrep is a fair test, it
doesn't have to 'do anything' with the results, like create a new
string from them). This is a rough perl equivalent of my original
problem:
I guess that's the point I was trying to get across - the overhead of
creating all those strings (and whatever other temporary objects
have to be
created behind the scenes) might be significant.
Right on the money.
http://xml.sys-con.com/node/250512 talks about this a bit in the
context of XML, and I commented in http://www.metaobject.com/blog/2008_10_01_archive.html
in the context of Cocoa and Objective-C.
The way to solve this problem is to (a) use C whenever you're dealing
with bulk data that can be expressed in C (b) create only the final
object representation, avoid intermediate object representations
( yes, I am looking at you, XML DOM and Cocoa Property List ) and (c)
optimize the heck out any intermediate objects you can not actually
avoid.
In Objective-XML, (a) is an unrolled character scanning state-
machine. Item (b) is accomplished by using various NSString-based
equivalence maps to construct a mapping layer that goes straight from
the C-characters that make up the original XML to semantically
relevant message-sends. Finally, (c) is achieved by re-using objects
as much as possible with an object-/thread-local object cache, turning
object alloc/dealloc cycles into a couple of pointer-manipulations
without any of the locking or other synchronization that is usually
necessary in memory ops.
(c) is not currently possible under GC, because it requires the retain-
count to see if object-references have escaped.
As Michael Ash has been kind enough to document, object
instantiation is
quite expensive :
http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/performance-comparisons-of-common-operations.html
Yes, object-allocation in Objective-C is rather expensive. If you are
using objects to represent C-level constructs such as characters or
numbers, you are looking at a roughly 100x overhead, which is
difficult to recover from if you're dealing with any significant
amounts of data (it obviously doesn't matter if you representing a
single number or text string in the UI).
But of course, if you need to break your original text up into
NSString's,
there's not much you can do about it.
Yep. However, with a little bit of creativity or pre-existing
libraries that encapsulate that creativity, you can actually do around
10-20x better.
Marcel
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