[patch] Preprocessorised tr1::tuple

[Chris Jefferson]

Paolo Carlini wrote:

> Chris Jefferson wrote:
>
>> Any comments are welcome. Apologises again that this is much less 
>> neat than I might like, but I found it very hard to make it neat and 
>> have been busy recently ¬_¬
>
>
> First, thanks Chris for your contributions, always very stimulating.
>
> I have a quick question (before going to sleep), not completely on 
> topic, maybe: compile time performance? Are you seeing any noticeable 
> degradation wrt your first implementation? I'm asking because often, 
> when I compare the behavior of Boost's type_traits to mine, I get the 
> impression that the former are (much ;) slower to compile... maybe 
> because of the pre-processor library, I wondered? To be clear: the 
> pre-processor library is one of those *very* smart pieces of code that 
> you can find in Boost - I barely understand it - but the only time I 
> looked briefly at it, I suspected that couldn't be very fast...
>

Yep, I actually meant to attach this to my previous mail. The 
performance is somewhat pained..

As a comparison, compiling a file with just a main and <functional> with 
"g++-cvs file.cc" takes 0.7 seconds on my computer.

If I limit the maximum tuple size to 10 (minimum by the standard), then 
compiling the new header takes 1.3 seconds, compiling the old one (or 
the new one already preprocessed, they are basically identical) takes 
about 1.1 seconds, so there isn't much in it.

if I now try uping the maximum allowed tuple size to 20, then compiling 
the old C generated tuple header (or the new one after I've 
pre-preprocessed it) takes about 1.3 seconds. Compiling the new 
macroised header takes about 2.0 seconds, so things are starting to look 
bad...

Unfortunatly, unlike Douglas' function code, I feel that there are just 
too many things that have to change in the tuple header depending on 
length, so trying to write the code in the style he wrote, while much 
faster would be much harder to read / maintain...

At the moment the header is designed to allow unrolling up to a depth of 
40. If this was cut back, then a little (30%ish) extra speed would 
ensue, while of course limiting the maximum size that the tuple header 
could get to.

One thing I don't know a lot about is the precompiled header support. If 
by the time TR1 is considered stable and generally usable the 
precompiled headers support is on by default, and is capable of handling 
this unrolling macro monstrosity, then that might "fix" the problem?

Chris