On the performance of boxed tuples
Stephen Dolan, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, published an interesting article A “sane” design for multicore OCaml recently and the following discussion on Reddit proved to be quite informative. In particular, more than one person asserted that ints, floats and tuples are fast in OCaml. In this blog post I’m going to take a look at tuple performance. As Stephen points out, one might reasonably expect unboxed tuples to be faster for passing arguments to functions and returning multiple values from functions because the elements can stay in registers but slower for storing in the heap because they require multi-word reads and writes instead of a single word (a pointer to the existing tuple). However, HLVM has shown that unboxed tuples can be extremely fast so why the discrepancy? The performance charactistics of different heap topologies are not quite so simple in a garbage collected environment. Two aspects of garbage collection affect the...