Summary:
Currently there is a direct cycle of dependencies Var -> Trm ->
Var. Inside Trm, these two modules are defined as mutually recursive
modules, so at some level this is ok. Due to internals of how
recursive modules are compiled, recursive modules that are
"unsafe" (that is, export some value of non-function type) are
compiled more efficiently. This diff moves Var from being defined
recursively with Trm to being a submodule of Trm. This eliminates that
Var -> Trm -> Var cycle and enables making Trm an "unsafe"
module. (Trm is still mutually recursive with Arith (and Arith0), but
they are "safe".)
The difference between how "safe" and "unsafe" recursive modules are
compiled, in this context, is that the safe ones are first initialized
to a block containing dummy function closures that immediately raise,
then the unsafe ones are initialized as normal modules, and then the
safe ones are back-patched. A consequence of this is that calls to
functions in safe recursive modules are "unknown" calls, and they are
implemented as loading from a pointer to a closure and calling the
generic caml_apply function. In contrast, calls to functions in normal
or "unsafe" modules can be known, and get compiled to direct assembly
calls to the statically resolved callee. The second case is
faster. Additionally, in the indirect case, the callee is unknown, and
so some register spilling and restoring is also potentially
involved. Normally (I guess), this difference in performance is not
significant, but it can be significant for e.g. compare or hash
functions of modules used as container keys / elements, where the
container data structure is very hot.
Reviewed By: ngorogiannis
Differential Revision: D26250517
fbshipit-source-id: ecef49b32
master
Josh Berdine4 years agocommitted byFacebook GitHub Bot