Optimisation ideas

I won’t manage to implement all of these idea in the beginning, so i just jot them down.

Inlining

Ok, this may not need too much explanation. Just work. It may be interesting to experiment how much this saves, and how much inlining is useful. I could imagine at some point it’s the register shuffling that determines the effort, not the actual call.

Again the key is the update notifications when some of the inlined functions have changed.

And it is important to code the functions so that they have a single exit point, otherwise it gets messy. Up to now this was quite simple, but then blocks and exceptions are undone.

Register negotiation

This is a little less baked, but it comes from the same idea as inlining. As calling functions is a lot of register shuffling, we could try to avoid some of that.

More precisely, usually calling conventions have registers in which arguments are passed. And to call an “unknown”, ie any function, some kind of convention is neccessary.

But on “cached” functions, where the function is know, it is possible to do something else. And since we have the source of the function around, we can do things previously impossible.

One such thing may be to recompile the function to accept arguments exactly where they are in the calling function. Well, now that it’s written down. it does sound a lot like inlining, except without the inlining:-)

An expansion if this idea would be to have a Negotiator on every function call. Meaning that the calling function would not do any shuffling, but instead call a Negotiator, and the Negotiator does the shuffling and calling of the function. This only really makes sense if the register shuffling information is encoded in the Negotiator object (and does not have to be passed).

Negotiators could do some counting and do the recompiling when it seems worth it. The Negotiator would remove itself from the chain and connect called and new receiver directly. How much is in this i couldn’t say though.