Quantcast
Channel: TURBU Tech » RTTI
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 10

The next RTTI bottleneck

0
0

A few years back, when I posted an analysis of how TValue is very slow, it prompted a lot of response from the community.  Various people ran their own benchmarks, and started working on building or optimizing their own meta-value types.  Some people are even still working on that today.  But one of the most interesting things was Robert Love’s response.  He looked at the TValue code and found a way that it could be optimized for the common case to speed things up.

I built on his foundation and sent a suggested patch to the Delphi team.  They made their own tweaks, and newer versions of Delphi have had a much faster TValue because of that.  But one of the most interesting things I heard while I was working on that improvement came from Barry Kelly. He said that he wasn’t sure how much those speedups would actually help, because the bulk of your CPU time in RTTI work was going to be spent in invocation (using the RTTI system to call methods) and not in moving data in and out of TValue variables.

And he was right.  If you wanna really break your brain sometime, trace into a call to TRttiMethod.Invoke and take a look at what all is taking place under the hood.  That’s a huge amount of work going on, and the interesting thing is how much of it will be exactly the same every time you invoke the same method, assuming you have a valid parameter list.

To do it quickly, you have to recompute as little of that setup code as possible every time.  The fastest way would be to write your own invocation routines, something like this:

function InvokeFuncA(var params: TArray<TValue>; const self: TValue): TValue;
begin
   result := (self.AsObject as TMyClass).FuncA(params[0].AsInteger);
end;

Of course, that’s a static invocation routine which only works for one method, which is the exact opposite of what TRttiMethod.Invoke does: provides you with a generic invocation routine that works for any method.  But it’s fast.

So… what if we could find a way to get TRttiMethod to create something like that for us, at runtime?  Instead of doing a bunch of work every time you call it to figure out what goes into memory where in order to convert your list of TValues into a native parameter list for a method, maybe it could work out how to perform that mapping, and express it in machine code.

It’s not as strange as it sounds. TMethodImplementation already does a certain amount of machine code generation at runtime to make some of the fancier RTTI tricks possible.  And with RTTI becoming used in more places in Delphi (it’s all over the place in Live Bindings, for example,) the last thing anyone wants is for it to be slow.

So, I’d like to challenge the community to step up to the plate again. Is there anyone out there who knows enough about low-level code to build what would essentially be a JIT compiler that takes a TRttiMethod as input and outputs a shim for fast invocation? I’ll be poking at things from one angle, but I’d like to invite anyone else who’s interested to help out. Let’s see how fast we can get RTTI invocation.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 10

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images