D01: Writing Truly Efficient Smalltalk

Tuesday, Oct 24, from 10:30 to 11:00
Tuesday, Oct 24, from 16:00 to 16:30
Wednesday, Oct 25, from 14:30 to 15:00
Thursday, Oct 26, from 13:30 to 14:00

Typically, developers resort to aggressive inlining when in need for higher performance. However, this has the drawback of making change very expensive. There is another way that is usually left unexplored. It achieves exceptional performance without inlining, and eliminates maintenance costs outright. Even more interestingly, if inlining becomes absolutely necessary due to performance concerns, the inlined expressions of this often unused methodology are able to run significantly faster than ordinary inlined implementations. This demo presents the results obtained by applying these techniques to the Smalltalk implementation of some features frequently seen in terms of regular expressions (CharacterArray>>match:). Among the results are a non-inlined implementation that can outpace an inlined implementation, and a novel inlined implementation that can run twice as fast as the existing, heavily-optimized one.