[armedbear-devel] CLOS optimizations

[Ville Voutilainen]

2009/10/12 Erik Huelsmann <ehuels at gmail.com>:
> Profiling one of the performance tests for CL-BENCH which shows huge
> difference with CLISP, it turned out that our CHECK-INITARGS function
> in the MOP package is taking 40% of the object instantiation time
> consumed by MAKE-INSTANCE. After the first invocation, it's possible
> to replace this function by a lookup in a cache.

I'm not all that surprised that check-initargs shows up with such a
high percentage.
That's what Peter Graves warned about, being the reason why the
checking has been
disabled thus far. I've been aware of the need for a cache of some
kind, but I'd prefer getting the
generic keyword argument checking to a working state before doing optimizations
(well, we can call them performance improvements if that sounds nicer
:)). We check
them pretty well for the methods invoked by make-instance, but that's
about it. We also
have some other method invocation failures in the ansi-tests.

I am interested in hearing ideas as to how the cache would be keyed
and what exactly
would it contain. I haven't done much design work to tackle this issue
yet, all I have
at the moment is a vague idea of using a mapping from _something_ to the
set of names of the keyword args in the EMF. It doesn't seem to be a
single-level 1-to-many mapping,
because there may be multiple discriminating types that are used for
choosing a method, and the
generic-function name itself is not sufficient either.

Maybe I'm just missing something simple. EMFs are compiled, so perhaps
the compilation
can create the cache/mapping?