• Russel Winder (15/15) Apr 15 2012 I am getting hints that using --inline in some small (well trivial
• bearophile (16/25) Apr 15 2012 Inlining (like most other things in life) is a matter of
• bearophile (9/9) Apr 16 2012 For interested people, there is a thread in D.learn that shows a
• Timon Gehr (2/11) Apr 16 2012

Russel Winder <russel winder.org.uk> writes:

I am getting hints that using --inline in some small (well trivial
really) compute intensive codes actually makes performance worse by a
few percent.  Nothing experimental / statistically significant, just
some anecdotal observations. Is this as it might be expected or is it
something that needs more investigation?

--=20
Russel.
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Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder ekiga.n=
et
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"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

Russel Winder:

 I am getting hints that using --inline in some small (well 
 trivial
 really) compute intensive codes actually makes performance 
 worse by a
 few percent.  Nothing experimental / statistically significant, 
 just
 some anecdotal observations. Is this as it might be expected or 
 is it
 something that needs more investigation?

Inlining (like most other things in life) is a matter of 
tradeoffs. Inlining removes the costs of function calls, allows 
some more small local optimizations, and increases code locality 
in the code cache, but it also increases code size and this 
sometimes increases cache misses. Finding the right amount of 
inlining to use is hard. The inliner works heuristically (and 
often only on the base of information known statically, unless 
you are using a JIT or profile-driven optimization) to balance 
such tradeoffs, trying to find something good enough on average. 
But sometimes its choice is suboptimal.

GCC offers user-written compiler hints to forbid the inlining of 
a specific function, or to almost-force the inlining of the 
function.

Bye,
bearophile

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

For interested people, there is a thread in D.learn that shows a 
missed inlining in DMD:
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/alnkynbdyddtrwpmfngr forum.dlang.org

(After that manual inlining the D code is slower still than the 
same C++ code).

I think  forceinline is not necessary here, a more aggressive 
inliner seems enough.

Bye,
bearophile

Timon Gehr <timon.gehr gmx.ch> writes:

On 04/16/2012 03:33 PM, bearophile wrote:
 For interested people, there is a thread in D.learn that shows a missed
 inlining in DMD:
 http://forum.dlang.org/thread/alnkynbdyddtrwpmfngr forum.dlang.org

 (After that manual inlining the D code is slower still than the same C++
 code).

I think there was an alternative D translation that was comparatively fast?

 I think  forceinline is not necessary here, a more aggressive inliner
 seems enough.

 Bye,
 bearophile