I know very little about compiling but I was surprised to see that Julia compiler doesn't optimize several processes.
Let's consider Julia (that is a Just-in-Time compiler) and let's consider these two pieces of code that do essentially the same thing.
n=1
@time for i = 1:10^8 n=n+1 end
elapsed time: 3.535394087 seconds (0 bytes allocated)
n=1
@time n=n+10^8
elapsed time: 6.599e-6 seconds (112 bytes allocated)
Why is a modern compiler not able to understand that this long loop will do nothing but adding 10^8
to n
?
The following example is even more striking I think
n=1
@time for i = 1:10^9 n=n end
elapsed time: 3.496573198 seconds (0 bytes allocated)
This is a problem when executing in global scope and is connected with optimizing under conditions where types could change, but given the right circumstances, the situation changes. Constraining the evaluation within a function allows the compiler to do much more. Consider the same thing but in a function.
function f(n::Int64)
x = 0;
for i = 1:n
x = x + 1;
end
return x;
end
julia> @time f(100)
elapsed time: 2.93e-6 seconds (80 bytes allocated)
100
julia> @time f(Int64(1e11))
elapsed time: 4.632e-6 seconds (112 bytes allocated)
100000000000
By checking the compiler output using code_native, you can see that the loop is optimized out
julia> code_native(f,(Int64,))
Source line: 6
push RBP
mov RBP, RSP
test RDI, RDI
jg L15
xor EDI, EDI
Source line: 6
L15: mov RAX, RDI
pop RBP
ret