On Wed, Apr 30, 2025 at 10:38:11AM -0400, Joel Fernandes wrote: > On 4/30/2025 9:25 AM, Alexandre Courbot wrote: > > On Tue Apr 22, 2025 at 11:44 PM JST, Danilo Krummrich wrote: > > >>> +/// Returns a boxed falcon HAL adequate for the passed `chipset`. > >>> +/// > >>> +/// We use this function and a heap-allocated trait object instead of > >>> statically defined trait > >>> +/// objects because of the two-dimensional (Chipset, Engine) lookup > >>> required to return the > >>> +/// requested HAL. > >> > >> Do we really need the dynamic dispatch? AFAICS, there's only E::BASE that > >> is > >> relevant to FalconHal impls? > >> > >> Can't we do something like I do in the following example [1]? > >> > >> [1] > >> https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2024&gist=bf7035a07e79a4047fb6834eac03a9f2 > > > > So are you have noticed there are two dimensions from which the falcons > > can be instantiated: > > > > - The engine, which determines its register BASE, > > - The HAL, which is determined by the chipset. > > > > For the engine, I want to keep things static for the main reason that if > > BASE was dynamic, we would have to do all our IO using > > try_read()/try_write() and check for an out-of-bounds error at each > > register access. The cost of monomorphization is limited as there are > > only a handful of engines. > > > > But the HAL introduces a second dimension to this, and if we support N > > engines then the amount of monomorphized code would then increase by N > > for each new HAL we add. Chipsets are released at a good cadence, so > > this is the dimension that risks growing the most.
I agree, avoiding the dynamic dispatch is probably not worth in this case considering the long term. However, I wanted to point out an alternative with [2]. > > It is also the one that makes use of methods to abstract things (vs. > > fixed parameters), so it is a natural candidate for using virtual > > methods. I am not a fan of having ever-growing boilerplate match > > statements for each method that needs to be abstracted, especially since > > this is that virtual methods do without requiring extra code, and for a > > runtime penalty that is completely negligible in our context and IMHO > > completely balanced by the smaller binary size that results from their > > use. > > Adding to what Alex said, note that the runtime cost is still there even > without > using dyn. Because at runtime, the match conditionals need to route function > calls to the right place. Honestly, I don't know how dynamic dispatch scales compared to static dispatch with conditionals. OOC, I briefly looked for a benchmark and found [3], which doesn't look unreasonable at a first glance. I modified it real quick to have more than 2 actions. [4] 2 Actions --------- Dynamic Dispatch: time: [2.0679 ns 2.0825 ns 2.0945 ns] Static Dispatch: time: [850.29 ps 851.05 ps 852.36 ps] 20 Actions ---------- Dynamic Dispatch: time: [21.368 ns 21.827 ns 22.284 ns] Static Dispatch: time: [1.3623 ns 1.3703 ns 1.3793 ns] 100 Actions ----------- Dynamic Dispatch: time: [103.72 ns 104.33 ns 105.13 ns] Static Dispatch: time: [4.5905 ns 4.6311 ns 4.6775 ns] Absolutely take it with a grain of salt, I neither spend a lot of brain power nor time on this, which usually is not a great combination with benchmarking things. :) However, I think it's probably not too important here. Hence, feel free to go with dynamic dispatch for this. > I am just not seeing the benefits of not using dyn for > this use case and only drawbacks. IMHO, we should try to not be doing the > compiler's job. > > Maybe the only benefit is you don't need an Arc or Kbox wrapper? That's not a huge concern for me, it's only one single allocation per Engine, correct? [2] https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2024&gist=99ce0f12542488f78e35356c99a1e23f [3] https://github.com/tailcallhq/rust-benchmarks [4] https://pastebin.com/k0PqtQnq
