HIPE'd stdlib modules rule !!!

[Chris Pressey]

On Tue, 27 May 2003 12:23:28 +0200 (MEST)
Kostis Sagonas <kostis@REDACTED> wrote:

>  1. The way the Erlang/OTP Makefiles work, the only safe way to make
>     a library of the system is to touch the corresponding files and
>     then issue a "make" command at the top-level.  This will generate
>     the appropriate header files (hipe_literals.hrl in this case). 

Ah, thanks.  I would then have to re-'make install'?
I've grown so used to 'erlc -o ebin src/*.erl' that it didn't occur to
me that the base system might need more delicate handling.

> [...]
> Without knowing more about your application, it is very difficult to
> say something intelligent here.  Can it be that your application is
> also heavily using other parts of OTP 9e.g. ets, ...)

ets, yes, but ets.beam was recompiled +native as part of stdlib.

> that you have
> not compiled to native and you get penalized by mode switches?

Only http that I can think of, and that's only used once at startup.

> Is this using R9B, and on which platform?

R9B-1, on FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE (Apr 21 2003)

>  > Anyway, my feeling is that judicious use of +native is probably a
>  > better way to go than just compiling everything with HiPE
>  > ("+naive"? :)
> 
> Judicious use beats naive use of everything hands down, so I could not
> agree more with the above. However, my experience is that it is very
> easy to have the illusion that "everything" was compiled to native
> code.

Perhaps I should bang together a script to :module_info all the modules
it can find and say which ones aren't +native?

Erik Stenman mentioned that one reason could be the extensive use of
dynamic dispatching in the storage behaviour (calls in the form
Module:function(...))  I also suspect its performance just depends too
heavily on message passing.  When I get some spare time I'll rewrite it
to eliminate the dynamic dispatching and turn the primary message
passing-reliant thing into function calls.  I'm sure I'll get better
performance then.

Meanwhile - with 'all' (most) of kernel+stdlib HiPE'd, common things
like using the shell, compiling, etc, do seem a little more sluggish
than normal, so it's not just this app...

> Cheers,
> Kostis.

-Chris