Re: [Chicken-users] Returning a void * by reference

[Zbigniew]

OS X on PPC.  Compilation flags are -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer
-fno-strict-aliasing -mcpu=7450 -DC_ENABLE_PTABLES.

I will try on my x86 box later.

On 11/24/05, felix winkelmann <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 11/24/05, Zbigniew <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Here's another interesting performance note, and I assure you
> > everything is compiled this time.
> >
> > I have a C function which returns a void * by reference (i.e. it takes
> > a void ** as argument).  I was using let-location, but I found that if
> > you pass a #<pointer> object as a scheme-pointer, it works just as
> > well and is about twice as fast.
> >
> > Okay, now the interesting part.  In numerous places, such as tcp.scm,
> > a string object is allocated and passed as a scheme-pointer so it can
> > be filled.  This is the same as taking my #<pointer> example above and
> > changing it to (make-string 4), assuming 32 bit pointers.
> >
> > What I found is that replacing (##sys#make-pointer) with (make-string
> > 4) incurs a huge number of garbage collections and is slow.  What's
> > more, using (make-byte-vector 4) does NOT have this problem!  I have
> > no idea why, as the implementation looks nearly identical to me
> > (basically, ##sys#allocate-vector).  These results are repeatable for
> > me.
> >
>
> On what system are you running this? On a x86 Linux box the
> string-based version is actually running faster than the byte-vector
> based one.
> String-allocation may result in some waste of memory, since strings
> are 8-byte aligned, byte-vectors are not. But the allocation difference
> in your case is quite substantial, which is odd.
>
>
> cheers,
> felix
>