GNU bug report logs - #50777
Dropping EIEIO from xref (for performance)

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From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov <at> yandex.ru>
To: 50777 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Cc: eli zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>, lars ingebrigtsen
Subject: bug#50777: Dropping EIEIO from xref (for performance)
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2021 16:28:38 +0300

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

X-Debbugs-CC: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>, Lars Ingebrigtsen 
<larsi <at> gnus.org>, Stefan Monnier <monnier <at> iro.umontreal.ca>, Daniel 
Martín <mardani29 <at> yahoo.es>, Mattias Engdegård <mattiase <at> acm.org>

With the recent discussion about our Lisp overhead when the search 
returns many matches, I went a couple more rounds to try to identify the 
hotspots.

My main benchmark for that is

  (benchmark 1 '(project-find-regexp "list"))

in the Emacs repo. The 3 recent commits have reduced that time from 8s 
to 6.5s on my machine (under best conditions: warm disk cache and fresh 
Emacs session). The machine is pretty fast, so I figure we can multiply 
that timing by 2x, to imagine the average user experience.

Having exhausted the obvious steps, I have looked at the difference 
between defclass and cl-defstruct in this respect. Earlier quick tests 
indicated there would be little to no difference, but now that I've 
wrote the full patch, it's significant.

The attached patch drops the timing of the above benchmark further down 
to 4.1s here.

Both allocation ('make-instance' vs auto-generated 'xref-make-*' struct 
constructors) and accessing the fields show increased performance, with 
the former showing the most improvement: I guess EIEIO's type checking 
added some extra overhead.

That creates some incompatibility (third-party packages can't inherit 
from 'xref-location' anymore, or use 'make-instance', 'oref' or 
'with-slots' with our values), but OTOH a quick survey of existing 
packages that integrate with Xref shows they wisely don't do that 
already. Not the largest, popular ones I have reviewed, at least.

The ones that do can be updated to rely on the recommended public 
interface: the xref-make-* constructors and the generic functions to 
access the data. This will keep the code compatible with both new and 
previous versions of Xref.

I'd like to push it soon, so users of Emacs 28 can enjoy the speedup.

What do people think?

[xref-from-defclass-to-defstruct.diff (text/x-patch, attachment)]

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