Re: inlining glib functions (Was: public barrier functions)
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 22:13 +0100, Tim Janik wrote:
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
Ter, 2005-12-13 às 17:11 +0100, Tim Janik escreveu:
IMHO, some functions are obvious candidates for inlining, regardless
of any profiling done on them. For instance:
gchar*
g_strdup (const gchar *str)
{
gchar *new_str;
gsize length;
if (str)
{
length = strlen (str) + 1;
new_str = g_new (char, length);
memcpy (new_str, str, length);
}
else
new_str = NULL;
return new_str;
}
This function is trivial. I doubt you'll ever find any new bugs in it.
It is called in many places. So why pay a performance penalty when you
could easily avoid it?
inlining doesn't automatically mean performance improvements and
not inlining doesn't automatically cause performance penalties.
if you start to inline lots of widely used small functions in
non performance critical code sections, all you've gained is a
bigger code section size and less likelyness for warm instruction
caches (that becomes especially critical when starting to bloat
tight loops due to inlining).
now consider that 90% of a programs runtime is spent in 10% of its
code, that means 90% of your inlininig does ocoour in non performance
critical sections.
that's why modern compilers use tunable heuristics to decide about
automated inlining and don't stupidly inline everything they can.
I personally would not say to inline every trivial function in GLib, I
was talking about single-instruction functions that are not inlined
right now, it might even be possible that the call instruction itself is
longer than the instruction itself, not to mention that functions linked
in from shared libraries jump twice to reach the actual body of the
function. (first call to a stub which jumps to the function itself), so
it effectively empties the instruction pipeline twice.
Nevertheless I shut up and post patches :) Thanks for the information
and sorry for the noise.
--
Bazsi
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Re: inlining glib functions (Was: public barrier functions)
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro said:
IMHO, some functions are obvious candidates for inlining, regardless
of any profiling done on them. For instance:
gchar*
g_strdup (const gchar *str)
{
gchar *new_str;
gsize length;
if (str)
{
length = strlen (str) + 1;
new_str = g_new (char, length);
memcpy (new_str, str, length);
}
else
new_str = NULL;
return new_str;
}
This function is trivial. I doubt you'll ever find any new bugs in it.
It is called in many places. So why pay a performance penalty when you
could easily avoid it? Glib has many such small functions.
g_strdup() is a *very* poor example of a function that could be inlined for
performance. The function is trivial, yes, but it calls strlen(), malloc(),
and memcpy() --- three operations which are going to swamp the time spent in
making a call to a real symbol for g_strdup(). This would be a misguided
optimization, throwing away the ability to fix bugs behind the scenes for a
negligible speed improvement.
--
muppet scott at asofyet dot org
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Re: inlining glib functions (Was: public barrier functions)
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
Ter, 2005-12-13 às 17:11 +0100, Tim Janik escreveu:
more important than _how_ to inline is _what_ and _why_ to inline.
in general, things that can easily and reasonably be inlined have been
already been provided as inlined functions or macros in the glib headers.
so for functions that are not inlined but you think _should_ be inlined,
a persuasive argument should be given, e.g. a profiling scenario where the
function in question shows up with significant figures and significant
timing improvements for using the inlined version.
the g_atomic_* functions are a good example of this (see profiling figures
mentioned in the original thread), but they are still not inlined for other
reasons.
IMHO, some functions are obvious candidates for inlining, regardless
of any profiling done on them. For instance:
gchar*
g_strdup (const gchar *str)
{
gchar *new_str;
gsize length;
if (str)
{
length = strlen (str) + 1;
new_str = g_new (char, length);
memcpy (new_str, str, length);
}
else
new_str = NULL;
return new_str;
}
This function is trivial. I doubt you'll ever find any new bugs in it.
It is called in many places. So why pay a performance penalty when you
could easily avoid it?
inlining doesn't automatically mean performance improvements and
not inlining doesn't automatically cause performance penalties.
if you start to inline lots of widely used small functions in
non performance critical code sections, all you've gained is a
bigger code section size and less likelyness for warm instruction
caches (that becomes especially critical when starting to bloat
tight loops due to inlining).
now consider that 90% of a programs runtime is spent in 10% of its
code, that means 90% of your inlininig does ocoour in non performance
critical sections.
that's why modern compilers use tunable heuristics to decide about
automated inlining and don't stupidly inline everything they can.
what you're suggesting is blind optimization, experienced programmers
will tell you that this will result in more harm than good. profiling
a critical section, and maybe inlining/optimizing a single string
copy in a critical loop can gain you ten- or hundredfold the improvements
that you could get from some shallow global optimization.
you don't even need to believe me, just start googling for
premature and optimization and read, there's enough stuff
out there to make your christmas holidays ;)
Glib has many such small functions.
[ BTW, if (str) could be changed to if (G_LIKELY(str)) ]
yes it could, and it would make sense. the best thing you can do to
make sure such improvements are integrated, is to submit complete
patches for such changes (including changelog entries) so we only
need to apply, compile and test them and are done.
(and if you have/need commit access, after a number of quality
submissions that is usually granted because it can save us
additional work.)
One other thing; it is well known that inline functions are better
than macros:
- Give you better type safety;
- Less cryptic warnings/errors when calling them with wrong types
- For debugging, you can still disable inlining through the CFLAGS in
order to step into the inline functions in step by step debugging;
So why not start using less macros and more inline functions?
well, we're not completely unaware of the type safety inline functions
can offer over some macros uses ;)
why don't you start to submit patches for macros where you think we
really should have used an inlined function and we discuss specific
cases then?
you can take a look at the existing glib headers to see how we do inlined
functions, and read the comments which describe how inlined functions
still are built in a non-inlined version into glib.
--
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
---
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Re: inlining glib functions (Was: public barrier functions)
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 15:40 -0500, muppet wrote:
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro said:
IMHO, some functions are obvious candidates for inlining, regardless
of any profiling done on them. For instance:
gchar*
g_strdup (const gchar *str)
{
gchar *new_str;
gsize length;
if (str)
{
length = strlen (str) + 1;
new_str = g_new (char, length);
memcpy (new_str, str, length);
}
else
new_str = NULL;
return new_str;
}
This function is trivial. I doubt you'll ever find any new bugs in it.
It is called in many places. So why pay a performance penalty when you
could easily avoid it? Glib has many such small functions.
g_strdup() is a *very* poor example of a function that could be inlined for
performance. The function is trivial, yes, but it calls strlen(), malloc(),
and memcpy() --- three operations which are going to swamp the time spent in
making a call to a real symbol for g_strdup(). This would be a misguided
optimization,
OK, I just made one mistake: I forgot that strlen and memcpy are
already inlined, so that function in particular turned out not to be so
small :P
Some examples of really tiny functions are g_list_find, g_list_length,
g_ascii_dtostr. About half a dozen assembly instructions (on x86) each.
throwing away the ability to fix bugs behind the scenes
I meant this only for functions that are trivial; do you think there's
any chance for anyone ever spot a bug in g_strdup?
Regards.
--
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The universe is always one step beyond logic
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Re: inlining glib functions (Was: public barrier functions)
On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 18:44 +, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:
Seg, 2005-12-12 às 19:29 +0100, Balazs Scheidler escreveu:
[...]
And while I am at it, would it be possible to change the atomic
operations to inline functions? I'd think it is much better inline
single-instruction functions as otherwise the call overhead is too
great.
I agree. Also many other glib functions could be static inline in the
public header files. For instance, many of the functions in glist.c and
gslist.c are really tiny, thus could easily be inlined, but aren't
because the compiler has no access to their implementation, only to
their prototype.
One problem I see with this is binary compatibility. The shared lib
version of glib has to provide the old non-inlined symbols, and simply
moving the functions to the header as static inline would remove those
symbols, even though I would not be surprised if this could be worked
around with some gcc trickery, something along the lines of:
gatomic.h:
static inline void
g_atomic_int_inc(gint *value)
{
...
}
ginlineimpls.c (probably auto-generated in some way):
#define g_atomic_int_inc __inline_g_atomic_int_inc
#include gatomic.h
#undef g_atomic_int_inc
void
g_atomic_int_inc(gint *value)
{
__inline_g_atomic_int_inc(value);
}
Other opinions?
--
Bazsi
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