Re: [cffi-devel] Performance of CFFI:PARSE-TYPE

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 3:21 PM, Hans Hübner hans@huebner.org wrote:

I have recently switched to using the cffi+lotsastuff version and I find it very slow for certain applications. The reason for this is that PARSE-TYPE is called from FOREIGN-TYPE-SIZE, and PARSE-TYPE is very expensive. It would be relatively easy to cache the type parsing results in a hash table, but before moving forward in that direction, I'd like to know what your opinions on this is.

PARSE-TYPE has been slow ever since it started to check for cycles. This change is not specific to the cffi+lotsastuff branch:

http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/darcsweb/darcsweb.cgi?r=cffi-cffi;a=filediff;h=20070607201117-28748-603bfd1543f4bbe02ad87bff9034b3beb3abd401.gz;f=src/early-types.lisp

A few weeks ago, some optimizations to PARSE-TYPE and FOREIGN-ALLOC (which was calling PARSE-TYPE more often than necessary). What's your use case?