[racket-dev] speeding up 16-bit integer adds

I think the problem is that the `ptr-ref' and `ptr-set!' operations are
slow. They are slow because they not yet inlined by the JIT, and
they're not yet inlined because they have complicated APIs (including a
"pointer" datatype with many variants).

I haven't worked out a way to make them faster or a way to provide
faster variants, but it's on my list.

At Thu, 23 Sep 2010 19:42:15 -0700, John Clements wrote:
> I'm trying to add together big buffers. The following code creates two big fat 
> buffers of 16-bit integers, and adds them together destructively. It looks to 
> me like this code *could* run really fast, but it doesn't; this takes about 
> 8.5 seconds. Changing + to unsafe-fx+ has no detectable effect.  Is there 
> allocation going on in the inner loop? I'd hoped that since an _sint16 fits 
> safely in 31 bits, that no memory would be allocated in the inner loop. Grr! 
> Any suggestions? (I ran a similar test on floats, and C ran about 64x faster, 
> about a tenth of a second).
> 
> Doc pointers appreciated as always,
> 
> John
> 
> #lang racket 
> 
> (require ffi/unsafe)
> 
> (define (make-buffer-of-small-random-ints len)
>   (let ([buf (malloc _sint16 len)])
>     (for ([i (in-range len)])
>       (ptr-set! buf _sint16 i 73))
>     buf))
> 
> (define buf-len (* 44100 2 200))
> 
> (define b1 (make-buffer-of-small-random-ints buf-len))
> (define b2 (make-buffer-of-small-random-ints buf-len))
> 
> (time
>  (for ([i (in-range buf-len)])
>    (ptr-set! b1 _sint16 i 
>              (+ (ptr-ref b1 _sint16 i)
>                 (ptr-ref b2 _sint16 i)))))