Performance

Computers are fast, and hardware is cheap. Still, it is nice to enjoy some performance. Especially because C and C++ are well known for that.

History

In order to keep track of the performance of Cover we're using the The Computer Language Benchmarks Game.

Date	Mandelbrot	Fannkuch	Change
2016-07-25	152.0		First running version.
2016-07-26	53.0		Switch to faster implementation mandelbrot_gcc2_split.cover.
2016-07-26	47.6		Handle doubles unboxed if possible.
2016-07-26	38.3		Add unboxed long[] and double[] arrays & switch to mandelbrot_gcc9_modified.cover.
2016-07-27	34.2		Variable scope + malloc builtin
2016-07-28	38.1		#include support
2016-07-28	250.7 (!)		Parse-time type system.
2016-07-28	249.7 (!)		All expressions are now typed.
2016-07-29	21.3		Don't use CoverReferences at runtime, just emit the correct write nodes directly.
2016-07-29	20.1		Mandelbrot: move local array definition out of the loop.
2016-07-31	20.3	521.2
2016-07-31	20.3	354.9	Fannkuch: block size to 1
2016-07-31	21.1	311.3	FrameSlot in CreateLocalXArray is now final!
2016-08-02	20.3	51.8	graal.TruffleBackgroundCompilation=false

Benchmarks were run on a i7 870 (2.93 GHz). The values reported are measured without any warmup. With warmup, benchmarks are about 3 seconds faster.

For comparison, here are the fastest times for other implementations. OpenMP was not used, so these run single-core.