#10062: Codegen on sequential FFI calls is not very good -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: chadaustin | Owner: Type: bug | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: Compiler | Version: 7.8.3 (CodeGen) | Operating System: Unknown/Multiple Keywords: | Type of failure: Runtime Architecture: | performance bug Unknown/Multiple | Blocked By: Test Case: | Related Tickets: Blocking: | Differential Revisions: | -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- I'm writing a library for efficiently building up a byte buffer. The fastest approach I've found is via FFI, with restricted effects like ST. It's over twice as fast as ByteString Builder. Consider this example API usage: https://github.com/chadaustin/buffer- builder/blob/6bd0a39c56f63ab751faf29f9784ac87d52638be/bench/Bench.hs#L46 It compiles into an instruction sequence containing direct, sequenced FFI calls. For example, the last three calls work out to: addq $8,%rsp movq %rbx,%rdi movq 72(%rsp),%rax movq %rax,%rsi subq $8,%rsp movl $0,%eax call bw_append_bsz addq $8,%rsp movq %rbx,%rdi movl $35,%esi subq $8,%rsp movl $0,%eax call bw_append_byte addq $8,%rsp movq %rbx,%rdi movq 64(%rsp),%rax movq %rax,%rsi subq $8,%rsp movl $0,%eax call bw_append_bsz I don't know why rsp is being changed so much. I also can't explain the assignment to eax before the call. (It should also be xorl eax,eax, I would think.) To my reading, the above instruction sequence could be reduced to: movq %rbx,%rdi movq 64(%rsp),%rsi call bw_append_bsz movq %rbx,%rdi movl $35,%esi call bw_append_byte movq %rbx,%rdi movq 56(%rsp),%rsi call bw_append_bsz To reproduce, check out git@github.com:chadaustin/buffer-builder.git at revision 6bd0a39c56f63ab751faf29f9784ac87d52638be cabal configure --enable-benchmarks cabal bench And then look at the ./dist/build/bench/bench-tmp/bench/Bench.dump-asm file. This is specifically on OS X 64-bit with GHC 7.8.3, but I saw similar code generation on GHC 7.6 on Linux 64-bit. -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10062 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler