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

[felix winkelmann]

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