2009/2/22 Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda@gmail.com:
On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Igor Stasenko siguctua@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/21 Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda@gmail.com:
Hi Igor,
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:37 PM, Igor Stasenko siguctua@gmail.com wrote:
Here the method:
isContextHeader: aHeader self inline: true. ^ ((aHeader >> 12) bitAnd: 16r1F) = 13 "MethodContext" or: [((aHeader >> 12) bitAnd: 16r1F) = 14 "BlockContext" or: [((aHeader >> 12) bitAnd: 16r1F) = 4]] "PseudoContext"
i think it wouldn't hurt to rewrite it as:
isContextHeader: aHeader self inline: true. | hdr | hdr := aHeader bitAnd: (16r1F << 12). ^ hdr = (13 << 12) "MethodContext" or: [ hdr = (14 << 12) "BlockContext" or: [ hdr = (4 << 12)]] "PseudoContext"
which will allow GCC to optimize it more easily. I'm not sure if it can optimize it in its current state. This may impact a small speedup of copy operations and any other operations which need to determine a number of pointer fields in object (users of #lastPointerOf:)
First you should look at the assembly that gcc generates to be sure anything is needed. e.g. cat >t.c <<END long isContext(long aHeader) { return ((aHeader >> 12) & 0x1F) == 13 || ((aHeader >> 12) & 0x1F) == 14 || ((aHeader >> 12) & 0x1F) == 4; } END gcc -O3 -S -fomit-frame-pointer t.c; cat t.s .text .globl _isContext _isContext: movl 4(%esp), %edx sarl $12, %edx andl $31, %edx leal -13(%edx), %eax cmpl $1, %eax jbe L2 cmpl $4, %edx je L2 xorl %eax, %eax ret L2: movl $1, %eax ret .subsections_via_symbols
So you don't need to do anything; it has done everything for you. However, one point is important. Using 16r1F << 12 et al as your masks and constants to compare against is much worse on many systems, most importantly x86, than shifting down by 12 and comparing against small constants, because the instruction set can encode small constants far more compactly, and that means better code density in the icache which is significant for performance. e.g. on x86 a constant in the range -128 to 127 typically takes a byte whereas anything else will take 4. But what I really think is that this is too low a level to worry about. Much more important to focus on
- context to stack mapping
- in-line cacheing via a JIT
- exploiting multicore via Hydra
and beyond (e.g. speculative inlining) than worrying about tiny micro-optimizations like this :)
Thanks Eliot. In fact, this method drawn my attention because of its number of checks. Typically, all code which dealing with object formats contain many branches. And from places where this method is called, there are additional checks surrounding it. So, the real problem is the overwhelming number of checks to do something, and i think this having own impacts on performance. I hope that a new object format with 64 bit header, which you plan to use, will allow us to avoid so many branches in code which having high usage frequency.
In fact the StackVM makes a big improvement to this very method because in the StackVM there are only MethodContexts and so the method reads isContextHeader: aHeader <inline: true> "c.f. {BlockContext. MethodContext. PseudoContext} collect: [:class| class -> class indexIfCompact]" ^(self compactClassIndexOfHeader: aHeader) == ClassMethodContextCompactIndex which is f course equivalent to isContextHeader: aHeader ^((aHeader >> 12) bitAnd: 16r1F) = 13 :)
yeah much more concise & understandable.
I currently thinking is there are simple ways to decompose huge ObjectMemory/Interpreter on multiple smaller classes. To illustrate it , applied to #isContextHeader: we could write it as following:
isContextHeader: aHeader <inline: true> <var: #aHeader class: #OopBaseHeader> ^ aHeader compactClassIndex == ClassMethodContextCompactIndex
and, of course, then we really don't need #isContextHeader: at all because we can simply write a direct message in methods where we need such checks:
<var: #header class: #OopBaseHeader> <var: #oop class: #Oop> header := oop basicHeader. header isContextHeader ifTrue: [ ... ]
The idea is to use type information in code generator to determine where it should look for a code when translating a message sends to C code. With little more heuristics, we don't even need to declare types so often: Oop>>basicHeader <returnType: #OopBaseHeader> ^ self longAt: 0 or even:
Oop>>basicHeader ^ (self longAt: 0) as:OopBaseHeader
so, then you could simply write: oop basicHeader isContextHeader ifTrue: [... ]
looks like a plain smalltalk code, isnt? :)
i'm using similar technique for static inlining in Moebius/CorruptVM.
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.