Re: Performance of records with variant parts

[John Perry <john.perry@usm.edu>]

On Monday, March 22, 2021 at 1:59:34 PM UTC-5, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> What is your optimization level? -O2? 

I've tried several. The one with the best performance is -O3 -funroll-loops -gnatn.

> Moreover, in your case the compiler should 
> statically know the offset of each discriminant-dependent component, so 
> accessing such a component should not require any overhead compared to a 
> record without discriminants. 

Precisely this perplexes me. Nothing in this section of the code would be unknown after the discriminant check. -- Nothing that seems obvious to me, anyway. I'll copy some code in a reply to someone else in a moment.

> However, in the past I've seen unexpectedly slow code for copying 
> records with discriminants. ...
> [very interesting material excised for brevity]
> If the compiler is stupidly checking the discriminant of obj for each 
> obj-component access, you may be able to speed up the code by creating 
> separate sub-procedures

I liked this idea and thought it might be the problem, but that also didn't help out. I may have to look at the assembly, which I am loath to do. :-/

john perry