On 12/04/2011 09:39 PM, Patrick Walton wrote:
Strongly disagree. If we cannot inline stuff like map, we cannot create a performant browser engine. There is no way around this.
I should elaborate: Short of just telling users they can't use the looping abstractions in the standard library if they want performant loops, which seems like a non-starter to me. I suspect that would just lead to systems programmers writing loops by hand, using macros, using the C preprocessor, or something like that. All of those options would result in relatively unstructured workarounds that miss out on the benefits of the functional abstractions we're offering.
We already see high-profile projects like SQLite do so-called "unity builds" where they concatenate everything into one enormous .c file. This is in spite of the fact that C already has macros and static/inline functions.
We could do measurements here with instrumenting rustc, but I'm not sure it would be relevant. What would be more relevant would be something like inserting two function calls (one direct, one indirect) around every pixel in pixman's alpha blending routines and seeing what the performance of Firefox becomes. But I think we already know what the results of this test would be.
Sorry for wording this so strongly, but I feel that this is an important issue.
Patrick _______________________________________________ Rust-dev mailing list Rust-dev@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
