On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
Why? For me smalltalk is a syntax and everything is an object. The
rest is optional.
Aren't instance variables part of the syntax? Or is Self Smalltalk?
?
What if you use the same syntax and behind the scene the system makes sure that
you get optimized message send?
That's possible with VM hacking, but I doubt you'd get the same
performance.
From a method reuse point of view we do not have offset based bytecode anymore.
Some primitives also rely on instance variable indexes.
Levente
Btw without instance variables you don't need mixins, cause you have traits.
If you only want mixins (instead of stateful traits), then there's at least
one mixin implementation for Squeak out there.
Now I have a question does the JIT or the shortcut (not sure if this is in
stackVM) blurry the cost of accessors
vs. direct accesses?
Bytecodes are still 10-12x faster with Cog than sends.
even those, which are optimized by jit?
i mean, could
| pt |
pt := 1...@2.
[ pt x ] bench
'2.789668866226755e6 per second.'
| pt |
pt := 1...@2.
[ pt xx ] bench
'2.642108378324335e6 per second.'
where Point>>xx is:
xx
^ self x
so, what are you mean by 10-12 times faster?
You benchmark has several flaws. It uses bench which is a message send by
itself and does several other sends, block activations, whatever. Just evaluate
[] bench.
to see the problem.
Here is the benchmark I based my idea about 10-12x performance difference:
0 tinyBenchmarks.
'540940306 bytecodes/sec; 50274171 sends/sec'
It shows 10.76x difference. You may say that it's inaccurate, so I wrote
another myself: http://leves.web.elte.hu/squeak/SendBenchmark.st
To run it evaluate the following:
SendBenchmark run.
My result is:
#(#(109 16) #(105 17) #(105 18) #(108 18) #(106 19)).
To get the difference (may not work in Pharo):
#(#(109 16) #(105 17) #(105 18) #(108 18) #(106 19)) sum in: [ :sum |
sum first / sum second roundTo: 0.01 ].
6.06
So it's 6x faster to use instance variables, than accessors.
Levente
Levente
P.S.: IIRC one of V8's optimizations is to use a common representation
(class) for objects that have the same slots (instance variables).
Does anybody run a benchmarck about
self x vs x in Cog recently
on a real app?
Stef
--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.
