Re: data structure lockin

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 20 Jan 2013, at 19:07, Mike McClurg <mike.mcclurg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Criterion is a great benchmarking library for Haskell: 
> http://www.serpentine.com/blog/2009/09/29/criterion-a-new-benchmarking-library-for-haskell/
> 
> The main advantage of Criterion is that it does statistical analysis on the 
> benchmarks it runs. It will measure the variance in a set of benchmark runs, 
> and will tell you how valid a run was. Anil suggested that I port the library 
> to OCaml as a masters thesis.

Not to worry; Thomas told me that Pierre Chambart is working on something 
similar as part of his exciting new benchmark suite.  Pierre has been steadily 
implementing a huge number of performance optimisations into the core OCaml 
compiler to speed up floating point code, access to low-level native integers, 
and bigarray accesses.  A lot of these (but not all) are part of the 
4.01.0dev+mirage-xen OPAM variant, so we've been greatly benefiting from them.

The next stage for us to do is to integrate some of the ad-hoc performance 
tests we have (e.g. DNS queryperf, TCP iperf, OpenFlow OFLOPS) into an 
environment where we can control the input parameters to the tests and have 
them run in a controlled way using Pierre's improvements.  This will help us 
judge whether the complexity of the new optimisations (and hence the risk of 
bugs in the compiler) is worth the extra speed gained from doing so.

-anil