On Jul 31, 2004, at 7:12 AM, Ronald J. Kuivila wrote:
Hi again,
The problem with this optimization is that creating the closure
object
is more overhead than the if statement.
I think my previous reply was too vague. My question was, if the
'if' is faster, can't you make a special primitive to encapsulate:
Stream-nextNotNil { arg event, func; var inEvent
if ((inEvent = this.next(event).notNil,
{^inEvent}, func);
}
As a specialized 'if' (i.e. using whatever branching magic makes if
fast)?
RJK
You can't write a primitive that requires dispatching to a method
within it. A primitive truly must be a primitive operation.
I don't think there is much to be gained here anyway. Eliminating the
extra Routines being created at each level was a huge savings. This is
peanuts.
You may not realize how your change actually helped. The major gain
from your fix was not really that it saved executing more byte codes,
it was eliminating time spent in the garbage collector due to
allocating the 512 slot stacks for each new Routine. By embedding
method calls rather than Routines, fewer Routines get allocated and so
less scanning needs to be done in the GC.
