[erlang-questions] byte_size/1 vs variable access

[Björn Gustavsson]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 1:42 PM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:
> Thanks.
>
> Is there any optimization when it's done inside a function clause guard? For
> example say, 5 of my 6 clauses need to check byte_size(Bin) to decide what
> to do. I am reading some code I wrote a few days ago and I see I
> instinctively used a single clause, creating a variable to hold the size and
> then used a if inside it. Perhaps the compiler is doing something about it
> in this case?

No. The compiler currently does not do much optimizations of guards.

> I know it doesn't matter 99% of the time, but I got one or two modules that
> deal with binaries where the smallest improvement means I can handle a bunch
> more traffic. To be honest it would be really nice if the compiler would
> automatically create a variable when it sees me use byte_size/1 more than
> once as I can then stop writing all this extra code. And I'm guessing it
> could probably do the same with length/1 and others.
>

Is any of that code open-source? I occasionally look
through BEAM assembly code looking for things
that the BEAM compiler could handle better. Pointers
to real-world code that is performance critical
are appreciated.

/Bjorn

-- 
Björn Gustavsson, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB