Holiday Hack: Bit Position #
hacking, December 30th 2011
Logically speaking, POSITION with trivial :KEY and :TEST arguments should be much faster on bit-vectors than on simple vectors: the system should be able to pull one words worth of bits out of the vector at a single go, check if any are set (or unset), and if so locate the one we're interested in — else going on to grab the next word.
Practically speaking, no-one who needed fast POSITION on bit-vectors seems to have cared enough to implement it, and so until yesterday (1.0.54.101) SBCL painstakingly pulled things one bit at a time from the vector, creating a lot of unnecessary memory traffic and branches.
How much of a difference does this make? I think the technical term is "quite a bit of a difference." See here for the benchmark results. First chart is from the new implementation, second from the new one. Other calls to POSITION are included for comparison: ones prefixed with generic- all go through the full generic POSITION, while the others know the type of the sequence at the call-site, and are able to sidestep a few things.
So, if you at some point considered using bit-vectors, but decided against them because POSITION wasn't up to snuff, now might be a good time to revisit that decision.
Gory details at the end of src/code/bit-bash.lisp, full story (including how the system dispatches to the specialized version) best read from git.
Also, if you're looking for an SBCL project for next year, consider the following:
- Using a similar strategy for POSITION on base-strings: on a 64-bit system one memory read will net you 8 base-chars.
- Using similar strategy for POSITION on all vectors with element-type width of half-word or less.
- Improving the performance of the generic POSITION for other cases, using eg. specialized out-of-line versions.
Happy Hacking and New Year!