Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi Adrian
The GHC users guide says overloading "is death to performance if
left to linger in an inner loop" and one thing I noticed while
playing about with the AVL lib was that using a HOF and passing
the (overloaded) compare function as an explicit argument at the
start seemed to give noticable a performance boost (compared with
dictionary passing presumably).
I'm not sure why that should be, but has anyone else noticed this?
A HOF is one box, the Ord dictionary is an 8-box tuple containing HOF
boxes. When you invoke compare out of Ord, you are taking something
out of the tuple, whereas when you use the HOF its directly there.
Well I can understand why overloading might be slow compared to
a direct call (presumably this is what you get from specialisation).
But I wouldn't have thought this additional indirection cost of
method lookup was very significant compared with the HOF approach
(at least not after everything was in cache). IOW I would have
expected HOFs to just about as deathly to performance as
(unspecialised) overloading, but it seems this isn't the case.
This is also the reason you get a performance decrease moving from a
1-element class to a 2-element class.
Why is that? Does ghc pass just the single method rather than a one
entry dictionary in such cases?
Regards
--
Adrian Hey
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