On Sat, 21 Jan 2017 11:45:10 -0800, ale...@yahoo.com wrote:
> Take a look at the following examples - the second is more than
> 10x(!!!) faster:
> m: my int $i = 0; loop { if $i++ == 10_000_000 { last }}; say now -
> INIT now;rakudo-moar f97d5c: OUTPUT«2.0606382»
> m: my int $i = 0; loop { if $i++ == 10_000_000 { last } else {} }; say
> now - INIT now;
> rakudo-moar f97d5c: OUTPUT«0.1727145»
>
> In my understanding of
> https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/nom/src/Perl6/Actions.nqp#L1675
> the first example is equivalent to:
>
> m: my int $i = 0; loop { if $i++ == 10_000_000 { last } else { Empty }
> }; say now - INIT now;
> rakudo-moar f97d5c: OUTPUT«WARNINGS for <tmp>:Useless use of constant
> value Empty in sink context (line 1)2.120407471»
That's because the two examples you are comparing are entirely different. The
case with implicit or explicit Empty can
be used in lists, in which the Empty slips away:
<Zoffix> m: sub stuff { if 0 {} }; dd [1, stuff(), 4]
<camelia> rakudo-moar 7f245f: OUTPUT«[1, 4]»
But the explicit `else {}` results in a Nil, which leaves unwanted stuff in
lists:
<Zoffix> m: sub stuff { if 0 {} else {} }; dd [1, stuff(), 4]
<camelia> rakudo-moar 7f245f: OUTPUT«[1, Any, 4]»
---
So naturally, the optimizer can check whether whether the value of the
conditional is ever used and avoid the Empty stuff, and it does so in some
cases:
<Zoffix> m: sub stuff { if 0 {} else {}; 42 }; for ^100_000 { $ = [1,
stuff(), 4] }; say now - INIT now;
<camelia> rakudo-moar 7f245f: OUTPUT«0.306001»
<Zoffix> m: sub stuff { if 0 {}; 42 }; for ^100_000 { $ = [1, stuff(), 4]
}; say now - INIT now;
<camelia> rakudo-moar 7f245f: OUTPUT«0.3428267»
It doesn't seem to do that for the OP case (even when you tack on an extra
value after it so result isn't used). So perhaps it could be taught to do so.
Note that I doubt you'd see much speedup from this in real-life code: "10
times" may sound impressive, but the average comes down to difference between
21.9 *nano*seconds vs 219 *nano*seconds.
