[TUHS] Early Unix function calls: expensive?

[scj at yaccman.com]

> A routine had to be pretty lengthy before it was worth paying the
> overhead, in
> order to amortize the calling cost across a fair amount of work (although
> of
> course, getting access to another three register variables could make the
> compiled output for the routine somewhat shorter).
>
>         Noel
>

I remember Dennis Ritchie telling me that the C compiler itself got
smaller and faster when he added register variables (and used them...)

I used to tell people that the time required to make a good optimizing C
compiler grew as the cube of the size of the instruction manual, including
the appendix on instruction execution timing.   These days they don't even
bother to have such an appendix, because timing depends on so many arcane
internal pipe stalls, memory refreshes, cache misses, etc. that it is
effectively uncomputible.  And then people wonder why
compiled code isn't very "good"...

At UC Berkeley, not long after they got their VAX, Prof. Susan Graham
gave a year-long class on optimization.  The first semester, the  students
learned all the relevant algorithms, etc.  The second semester,
they each implemented an optimization and integrated them into the Unix
F77 compiler.  As I recall, they got a 15% speedup on a set of benchmarks.

Then, over the summer, a student who had studied the VAX hardware
realized that the typical FORTRAN expression ( A = B op C ) was dealing
with three 32-bit addresses, and the resulting instruction was too big
to fit into the instruction lookahead buffer.  Allocating a register to
point to the internal (static) variables for each routine and using a
16-bit offset made these instructions fit, and the performance
improvement (for what was a 2-day fix) was 20%.

The moral of the story is that overhead kills you, and unknown or
uncharacterized overhead is especially fatal...