[mercury-users] compilation time

[Tyson Dowd]

On 22-Feb-2000, Thomas Charles CONWAY <conway at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 22, 2000 at 06:09:32AM EST, Robert Bossy wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I came to compile a thousand lines long mercury code and it took nearly
> > 5 minutes.
> 
> Count yourself lucky. Yesterday I found a performance bug in the compiler
> and my 70 line module took 2 hours to compile. Fortunately it looks like
> Fergus has found and fixed the problem, so it should go back to taking
> the few seconds it should.
> 
> Generally speaking though, if you have large tables of facts, or large
> constant terms, these are both things which can trigger super-linear
> running times. With facts, you can sometimes break them up which helps.
> For example in my clone of yacc: moose, I generate the parsing tables
> as facts:
> 
> :- pred action(state, symbol, action).
> :- mode action(in, in, out) is semidet.
> 
> action(state1, id(_), shift(state2)).
> action(state1, (+), shift(state9)).
> .... for a thousand or more lines ....
> 
> The compile time for this sort of thing is very big.
> You can get a very substantial improvement by breaking
> it up:
> 
> action(state1, Sym, Action) :-
> 	actions1(Sym, Action).
> action(state2, Sym, Action) :-
> 	actions2(Sym, Action).
> ....
> 
> :- pred actions1(symbol, action).
> :- mode actions1(in, out) is semidet
> ....
> 
> With large constant terms there are a couple of things you can try.
> Read them in at runtime or compute them at runtime if they're
> medium sized. Another option is to split them into smaller
> constants (in separate predicates) and assemble the pieces at
> runtime.

I should also say -- if there is a particular performance problem
you'd like improved, your chances are increased enormously if we can
see the code in question.  We can then either give you a quick hint on
how to change the code, and if we are lucky it might reveal a good
opportunity for us to improve the compiler.

By the way, I suspect this is a question that should go in the FAQ.
We have been a bit slack in adding new entries to the FAQ.

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # 
                            #  Surreal humour isn't eveyone's cup of fur.
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        # 
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #
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