[Openmcl-devel] Performance benchmark results

[Christophe Rhodes]

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 07:53:00PM -0600, Gary Byers wrote:
> This is certainly interesting; thanks for doing this.
> 
> A few of these numbers don't look right to me (sadly, a few others
> look All Too Right.)  I wasn't quite sure what was going on at first;
> as brilliant and clever as sbcl/ppc's backend is, it's a little hard
> to believe that FACTORIAL should be more than 3x faster than OpenMCL's
> (OpenMCL stoleuses the same bignum representation as CMUCL/
> SBCL, and OpenMCL's bignumXfixnum multiply routine is written in
> assembler and not obviously inefficient.)

Heh. We on the sbcl side were unsure where to send congratulations and
comiserations, since you had a large part to play in both
implementations ;-)

> I find it surprising that a bytecoded implementation is often over an
> order of magnitude faster than either of the native implementations on
> most of the BIGNUM/* benchmarks; I suspect some mixture of Black Magic,
> clever algorithms, and (possibly) a little excessive zeal on the part
> of CLISP's compiler.  (It seemed that some calls to "side-effect-free"
> arithmetic functions were getting optimized out because their results
> weren't used.)  I may have been mistaken about the excessive zeal or
> may have misinterpreted the disassembled bytecode I looked at; I'll
> try to look again when I'm more awake.  Whether that's a factor or not,
> I'm sure that there's room for improvement in both OpenMCL and SBCL.

Indeed. My understanding wrt clisp's bignum performance is that it uses
a C bignum library (CLN?) for most of the hard work, so it's only
byte-compiling function calls for the arithmetic.

Cheers,

Christophe
-- 
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