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pcwalton's profile
Patrick Walton
Patrick Walton
Patrick Walton
@pcwalton

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Patrick Walton

@pcwalton

Research engineer at Mozilla

San Francisco, CA
pcwalton.github.io
Joined November 2009

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    Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton Jan 9
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    I think the biggest GC-related performance benefit of value types isn’t that you can allocate them on the stack, since a generational GC will easily eat up those allocations. It’s so that more *long-lived* data can become pointer-free and not scanned at all.

    8:31 PM - 9 Jan 2020
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    8 replies 19 retweets 123 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton Jan 9
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        e.g. consider a particle simulation with “class Particle { Vector pos; Vector vel; }”. If Vector is a pointer type then the GC will have to scan every Particle. But if Vector is a value type, then GC can avoid looking inside Particles entirely. Now imagine you have 1M particles…

        2 replies 6 retweets 31 likes
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      3. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton Jan 9
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        Of course in Java you would often optimize this as “class Particle { float pX, pY, pZ, vX, vY, vZ; }”. But then you’re in the bad situation of having to choose between having nice methods on vectors and performance. Value types let you have both.

        5 replies 4 retweets 41 likes
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      4. End of conversation
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      2. Filip Jerzy Pizło‏ @filpizlo Jan 10
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        It’s not really true that a generational GC will just eat those allocations up since that “eating” has cost. Also value types don’t go “on the stack”. The benefit of value types is some combination of the values being register allocated, less GC pressure, and less ptr chasing.

        1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
      3. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton Jan 10
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        Replying to @filpizlo

        The JVM and most other VMs use escape analysis (really: SROA) to promote non-value types to registers already.

        1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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      2. Lars Bergstrom‏ @larsberg_ Jan 10
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        One of the interesting things about moving to more value types is that you start to see your GC retaining and moving nearly 100% of data through gen1/gen2... and all of a sudden you start implementing "pretenuring" or "large / long-lived object allocation" directives.

        1 reply 1 retweet 7 likes
      3. Lars Bergstrom‏ @larsberg_ Jan 10
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        Replying to @larsberg_ @pcwalton

        We saw this a lot as a fallout of aggressive monomorphization combined with inlining & contraction, as those reduced a lot of the small object allocations that were really only around to allow potential polymorphic usage & generic iteration constructs.

        1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
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      1. Rick Brewster‏ @rickbrewPDN Jan 9
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        This is one of the reasons I hate Java so much. It constantly forces you to choose between good abstractions with horrible performance, or terrible abstractions with better (but still bad) performance

        0 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
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      2. William Saar‏ @saarw Jan 9
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        Yup, practical limitations on heap size in garbage collected runtimes are often really due to object count rather than byte size of data.

        1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
      3. William Saar‏ @saarw Jan 9
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        Replying to @saarw @pcwalton

        You can get around that by having accessor interfaces into arrays of data, but value types can hopefully add more memory layout guarantees that lets the runtime optimize such accesses and conversions from bytes to other primitive types.

        0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
      4. End of conversation
      1. hello again‏ @bobpoekert Jan 11
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        Replying to @pcwalton

        but that implies that typed array libraries get you all the perf benefit of value types

        0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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