On 09 Sep 2010, at 20:38, Seth Grover wrote:
> The documentation
> (http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/prog/progse46.html) indicates
> that "RelocateThreadVar is called each time when a thread is started,
> and once for the main thread."
>
> Is it not called much more frequently than this?
Yes.
> I was doing some
> profiling with valgrind and noticed that every call to
> fpc_pushexceptaddr/fpc_popaddrstack resulted in a call to
> CRelocateThreadVar. From stepping through in gdb, it appears that
> *every* time a threadvar is accessed (in this case, the exception
> stack). It doesn't run through all of the code of CRelocateThreadVar
> because of the non-nill result of pthread_getspecific, but it is
> called.
That's correct.
> It seems that every time a threadvar is accessed, we're checking to
> make sure threadvars have been initialized/allocated for this
> particular thread. Is that correct?
Yes, to support threads that are started in external code. Note that the check
is basically for free, since we have to call pthread_getspecific() anyway to
get the content of the regvar (unless someone implements and maintains, for
those architectures and platforms that have a supported API to do so, direct
threadvar access support).
> I can certainly see why exceptions are to be avoided in
> performance-critical code. :).
The threadvar accesses are unlikely to impact the speed of exception handling
much if anything. The setjmp and memory allocation/freeing are way more
expensive.
Jonas
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