[cffi-devel] Performance of CFFI:PARSE-TYPE

[Hans Hübner]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 5:49 PM, Luís Oliveira <luismbo at gmail.com> wrote:
> PARSE-TYPE has been slow ever since it started to check for cycles.
> This change is not specific to the cffi+lotsastuff branch:

We are using the latest release version of CFFI internally, and I have
tried out the cffi+lotsastuff branch as we are interested in the
integration of Babel.  When I switched to the branch, I saw the
performance of our application drop dramatically, and the profiler
showed that run time is dominated by calls to PARSE-TYPE.  I have
implemented a caching mechanism as a cure, but as that is not thread
safe, it is not a general solution.

> A few weeks ago, some optimizations to PARSE-TYPE and FOREIGN-ALLOC
> (which was calling PARSE-TYPE more often than necessary). What's your
> use case?

Every invocation of FOREIGN-STRING-ALLOC eventually invokes
PARSE-TYPE, and we use it a lot.

-Hans