Re: exceptions and optimization

2019-10-21 Thread Nicholas Wilson via Digitalmars-d-learn

On Monday, 21 October 2019 at 21:09:32 UTC, Peter Jacobs wrote:
On Monday, 21 October 2019 at 20:37:32 UTC, Nicholas Wilson 
wrote:


What kind of conditions are you wanting to throw exception on? 
infinities, NaNs, ill conditioning, something else?


As always the best way to check is to mark the function of 
interest, nothrow take a look at the disassembly and compare 
to without nothrow. You may also want to look to the 
optimisation summary that I _think_ you can get LDC to 
generate.


Our methods take a few short cuts and occasionally step over a 
stability boundary, so I guess that it may look like 
ill-conditioning.


The reason I asked that is to see what sort of action you take 
because there may be better architectures that you can use to 
handle that kind of change.


For example, you are integrating with some scheme and hit a 
region of high curvature and need to rollback and change scheme 
(to either a less coarse time step or better integrator). In 
which case it may be best to take a page out of databases and use 
a change-commit kind of approach to short circuit through your 
calculations and if at the end of your update loop a flag is set 
that says this update is invalid then retry with another scheme.



Thank you for the explanation and suggestions.




Re: exceptions and optimization

2019-10-21 Thread Peter Jacobs via Digitalmars-d-learn

On Monday, 21 October 2019 at 20:37:32 UTC, Nicholas Wilson wrote:


What kind of conditions are you wanting to throw exception on? 
infinities, NaNs, ill conditioning, something else?


As always the best way to check is to mark the function of 
interest, nothrow take a look at the disassembly and compare to 
without nothrow. You may also want to look to the optimisation 
summary that I _think_ you can get LDC to generate.


Our methods take a few short cuts and occasionally step over a 
stability boundary, so I guess that it may look like 
ill-conditioning.


Thank you for the explanation and suggestions.



Re: exceptions and optimization

2019-10-21 Thread Nicholas Wilson via Digitalmars-d-learn

On Monday, 21 October 2019 at 20:12:19 UTC, Peter Jacobs wrote:
Toward the end of Walter's recent talk, D at 20, he says 
something to the effect that optimizations are disabled when 
exceptions can be thrown.  We have a compressible flow solver 
in which it is very convenient to be able to throw an exception 
from deep within the code and catch it at a relatively high 
level where we can partially recover and continue the 
calculation.  Because our calculations can run for days across 
hundreds of processors, we also care about letting the 
optimizer do its best. In what parts of our program would the 
optimizer be disabled because of the presence of the exception 
and its handling code?  How do we tell?


It really comes into effect if you use:

a) structs with destructors
b) scope(exit) and scope(failure)

as these need to be run, regardless of the return mode of the 
function i.e. normally or via an exception.


Also if the function is nothrow (possibly inferred because its a 
template, n.b. also that nothrow function can throw Errors as 
these are considered terminal) then you should also be fine. The 
effect of exceptions on optimisation effect logic heavy code a 
lot more that math heavy code.


What kind of conditions are you wanting to throw exception on? 
infinities, NaNs, ill conditioning, something else?


As always the best way to check is to mark the function of 
interest, nothrow take a look at the disassembly and compare to 
without nothrow. You may also want to look to the optimisation 
summary that I _think_ you can get LDC to generate.




exceptions and optimization

2019-10-21 Thread Peter Jacobs via Digitalmars-d-learn
Toward the end of Walter's recent talk, D at 20, he says 
something to the effect that optimizations are disabled when 
exceptions can be thrown.  We have a compressible flow solver in 
which it is very convenient to be able to throw an exception from 
deep within the code and catch it at a relatively high level 
where we can partially recover and continue the calculation.  
Because our calculations can run for days across hundreds of 
processors, we also care about letting the optimizer do its best. 
In what parts of our program would the optimizer be disabled 
because of the presence of the exception and its handling code?  
How do we tell?