Just an update (in case anyone is interested!). I went for the approach
described below of having a Value type holding a scalar for quick access to
values that fit in 64 bits (ints, floats, bools) and an interface fo for
the rest.
type Value struct {
scalar uint64
iface interface{}
}
That significantly decreased memory management pressure on the program for
many workloads, without having to manage a pool of say integer values. It
also had the consequence of speeding up many arithmetic operations. Thanks
all for your explanations and suggestions!
--
Arnaud
On Wednesday, 16 December 2020 at 11:15:32 UTC Arnaud Delobelle wrote:
> Ah interesting, I guess that could mean I would need to switch to using
> reflect.Value as the "value" type in the Lua runtime. I am unclear about
> the performance consequences, but I guess I could try to measure that.
>
> Also, looking at the implementation of reflect, its seems like the Value
> type I suggested in my reply to Ben [1] is a "special purpose" version of
> reflect.Value - if you squint at it from the right angle!
>
> --
> Arnaud
>
> [1]
> type Value struct {
> scalar uint64
> iface interface{}
> }
> On Wednesday, 16 December 2020 at 00:56:52 UTC Keith Randall wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately for you, interfaces are immutable. We can't provide a means
>> to create an interface from a pointer, because then the user can modify the
>> interface using the pointer they constructed it with (as you were planning
>> to do).
>>
>> You could use a modifiable reflect.Value for this.
>>
>> var i int64 = 77
>> v := reflect.ValueOf(&i).Elem()
>>
>> At this point, v now has .Type() of int64, and is settable.
>>
>> Note that to get the value you can't do v.Interface().(int64), as that
>> allocates. You need to use v.Int().
>> Of course, reflection has its own performance gotchas. It will solve this
>> problem but may surface others.
>> On Tuesday, December 15, 2020 at 12:04:54 PM UTC-8 ben...@gmail.com
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Nice project!
>>>
>>> It's a pity Go doesn't have C-like unions for cases like this (though I
>>> understand why). In my implementation of AWK in Go, I modelled the value
>>> type as a pseudo-union struct, passed by value:
>>>
>>> type value struct {
>>> typ valueType // Type of value (Null, Str, Num, NumStr)
>>> s string // String value (for typeStr)
>>> n float64 // Numeric value (for typeNum and typeNumStr)
>>> }
>>>
>>> Code here:
>>> https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk/blob/22bd82c92461cedfd02aa7b8fe1fbebd697d59b5/interp/value.go#L22-L27
>>>
>>> Initially I actually used "type Value interface{}" as well, but I
>>> switched to the above primarily to model the funky AWK "numeric string"
>>> concept. However, I seem to recall that it had a significant performance
>>> benefit too, as passing everything by value avoided a number of allocations.
>>>
>>> Lua has more types to deal with, but you could try something similar. Or
>>> maybe include int64 (for bool as well) and string fields, and everything
>>> else falls back to interface{}? It'd be a fairly large struct, so not sure
>>> it would help ... you'd have to benchmark it. But I'm thinking something
>>> like this:
>>>
>>> type Value struct {
>>> typ valueType
>>> i int64 // for typ = bool, integer
>>> s string // for typ = string
>>> v interface{} // for typ = float, other
>>> }
>>>
>>> -Ben
>>>
>>> On Wednesday, December 16, 2020 at 6:50:05 AM UTC+13 arn...@gmail.com
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi
>>>>
>>>> The context for this question is that I am working on a pure Go
>>>> implementation of Lua [1] (as a personal project). Now that it is more or
>>>> less functionally complete, I am using pprof to see what the main CPU
>>>> bottlenecks are, and it turns out that they are around memory management.
>>>> The first one was to do with allocating and collecting Lua "stack frame"
>>>> data, which I improved by having add-hoc pools for such objects.
>>>>
>>>> The second one is the one that is giving me some trouble. Lua is a
>>>> so-called "dynamically typed" language, i.e. values are typed but
>>>> variables
>>>> are not. So for easy interoperability with Go I implemented Lua values
>>>> with the type
>>>>
>>>> // Go code
>>>> type Value interface{}
>>>>
>>>> The scalar Lua types are simply implemented as int64, float64, bool,
>>>> string with their type "erased" by putting them in a Value interface. The
>>>> problem is that the Lua runtime creates a great number of short lived
>>>> Value
>>>> instances. E.g.
>>>>
>>>> -- Lua code
>>>> for i = 0, 1000000000 do
>>>> n = n + i
>>>> end
>>>>
>>>> When executing this code, the Lua runtime will put the values 0 to 1
>>>> billion into the register associated with the variable "i" (say, r_i).
>>>> But
>>>> because r_i contains a Value, each integer is converted to an interface
>>>> which triggers a memory allocation. The critical functions in the Go
>>>> runtime seem to be convT64 and mallocgc.
>>>>
>>>> I am not sure how to deal with this issue. I cannot easily create a
>>>> pool of available values because Go presents say Value(int64(1000)) as an
>>>> immutable object to me, so I cannot keep it around for later use to hold
>>>> the integer 1001. To be more explicit
>>>>
>>>> // Go code
>>>> i := int64(1000)
>>>> v := Value(i) // This triggers an allocation (because the interface
>>>> needs a pointer)
>>>> // Here the Lua runtime can work with v (containing 1000)
>>>> j := i + 1
>>>> // Even though v contains a pointer to a heap location, I cannot
>>>> modify it
>>>> v := Value(j) // This triggers another allocation
>>>> // Here the Lua runtime can work with v (containing 1001)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I could perhaps use a pointer to an integer to make a Value out of.
>>>> This would allow reuse of the heap location.
>>>>
>>>> // Go code
>>>> p :=new(int64) // Explicit allocation
>>>> vp := Value(p)
>>>> i :=int64(1000)
>>>> *p = i // No allocation
>>>> // Here the Lua runtime can work with vp (contaning 1000)
>>>> j := i + 1
>>>> *p = j // No allocation
>>>> // Here the Lua runtime can work with vp (containing 1001)
>>>>
>>>> But the issue with this is that Go interoperability is not so good, as
>>>> Go int64 now map to (interfaces holding) *int64 in the Lua runtime.
>>>>
>>>> However, as I understand it, in reality interfaces holding an int64 and
>>>> an *int64 both contain the same thing (with a different type annotation):
>>>> a
>>>> pointer to an int64.
>>>>
>>>> Imagine that if somehow I had a function that can turn an *int64 to a
>>>> Value holding an int64 (and vice-versa):
>>>>
>>>> func Int64PointerToInt64Iface(p *int16) interface{} {
>>>> // returns an interface that has concrete type int64, and
>>>> points at p
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>> func int64IfaceToInt64Pointer(v interface{}) *int64 {
>>>> // returns the pointer that v holds
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>> then I would be able to "pool" the allocations as follows:
>>>>
>>>> func NewIntValue(n int64) Value {
>>>> v = getFromPool()
>>>> if p == nil {
>>>> return Value(n)
>>>> }
>>>> *p = n
>>>> return Int64PointerToint64Iface(p)
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>> func ReleaseIntValue(v Value) {
>>>> addToPool(Int64IPointerFromInt64Iface(v))
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>> func getFromPool() *int64 {
>>>> // returns nil if there is no available pointer in the pool
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>> func addToPool(p *int64) {
>>>> // May add p to the pool if there is spare capacity.
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>> I am sure that this must leak an abstraction and that there are good
>>>> reasons why this may be dangerous or impossible, but I don't know what the
>>>> specific issues are. Could someone enlighten me?
>>>>
>>>> Or even better, would there be a different way of modelling Lua values
>>>> that would allow good Go interoperability and allow controlling heap
>>>> allocations?
>>>>
>>>> If you got to this point, thank you for reading!
>>>>
>>>> Arnaud Delobelle
>>>>
>>>> [1] https://github.com/arnodel/golua
>>>>
>>>
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