We're still not on the same page. You seem to have some ideological objection to inlining that I am completely failing to comprehend. Just because a procedure call (message send) is inlined doesn't in the least mean it *isn't* a procedure call (message send), just as compiling a procedure call (message send) as a jump (last-call optimisation) doesn't mean it *isn't* a procedure call (message send). By the way, forget about "40 years ago". I just did an experiment in Pharo 9, and found that using "_ ifNotNil: " instead of "_ izNil ifFalse: " -- where izNil is a non-inlined self == nil -- gave a 10% speedup, in a test code where real work was going on as well. As for turning off all inlining, what do you think that would do to #ifFalse:ifTrue: and its relatives?
On Thu, 17 Mar 2022 at 08:34, <s...@clipperadams.com> wrote: > > To start with, why do you CARE whether a particular method is inlined or > not? > > I care because it makes “everything is a message” a lie! And I suspect (no > proof and could be wrong) it’s an optimization that only made sense with > the hardware constraints of 40+ years ago. Arguing against premature > optimization is hardly something I just made up ;-) > > This makes absolutely no sense to me. What makes you think that the > combination "_ isNil ifFalse: [_]" will NOT be inlined? > > I may have been unclear. My intent was to communicate: “I’d like to stop > ALL* inlining of messages by default if possible” > > *or as many as practical > > The thing that rings loud alarm bells for me is there being "long chains" > in the first place. > > I agree that it is in general a smell, but long chains was tangential to > the intention above > > Can you give an example? > > I don’t know if I can think of one that’s not contrived… Wrapping > something external? Squeak’s AppleScript support used to mirror the > underlying AS, which is pretty much exactly that. > > In my own programming, I've generally found that nils turning up in the > middle of a chain indicates a serious design error somewhere. > > Agreed. See smell comment above. >
