Re: [Chicken-users] A more detailed plea for help with FFI...

[Tony Garnock-Jones]

Ed Watkeys wrote:
> It runs on my machine in about 0.8 seconds. Doing the math, that comes 
> to about 1100 processor cycles per malloc()/free() pair. That's about 
> one percent of the time delta.
>
> Felix already has a pretty good suspect: finalizer dispatching code that 
> does a linear search through a list.

Yep, ok, I take it back - malloc/free in this case is certainly far 
lighter than the finalisation code. :-)

On the other hand, 1100 cycles is pretty appalling; one neat nugget of 
information from Richard Brooksby's talk on the MPS garbage-collection 
system last night was that during the development of MLWorks, they 
measured the entire overhead of a malloc/free pair in the ML system to 
be on average *two and one half instructions per allocation*. Two 
instructions for the alloc, and one half for the garbage collection 
overhead. Just amazing...

Tony