HN.zip

Devirtualization and Static Polymorphism

19 points by dalvrosa - 4 comments
hinkley [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I wonder if I still have the link.

One of the papers I had bookmarked when toying with my own language design was someone that had worked out how to make interfaces as fast or faster than vtables by using perfect hashing and using the vtable as a hash table instead of a list.

You can also, when inlining a polymorphic call, put a conditional block in that bounces back to full dispatch if the call occasionally doesn’t match the common case. The problem with polymorphic inlining though is that it quickly resembles the exact sort of code we delete and replace with polymorphic dispatch:

    if (typeof arg1 == “string”) {
    } else if typeof arg1 === …) {
    } else if {
    } else if {
    } else {
    }
dalvrosa [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Nice one, TIL

One caveat with "hash vtables" is that you only really see a performance win when the interface has a lot of specializations.

pjmlp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Nice overview, it misses other kinds of dispatch though.

With concepts, templates and compile time execution, there is no need for CRTP, and in addition it can cover for better error messages regarding what methods to dispatch to.

dalvrosa [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Fair. New C++ standards are providing great tools for compile-time everything But still CRTP is widely used in low-latency environments :)