[Mono-dev] Patch to boost speed of UnicodeEncoding

[Zac Bowling]

That's interesting. Thanks for that. That gives me a another 
perspective on it.

One thing though. I think it should be "BitConverter.IsLittleEndian == 
bigEndian" rather then not "!=". If the System is little Endian and the 
conversions is not big Endian, then it would be the same. That confused 
me at first too and your test didn't catch that because it reverses 
what it do each time.

I didn't even think of using buffer.blockcopy here. That's pretty cool. 
I was going off the code inside String.cs which uses a set of functions 
called "memcpy". I need to do some research on why we don't use 
BlockCopyInternal inside String.cs (maybe String.cs hasn't been looked 
at in a while).

I'm going to setup up a profiler and some testing/sanity checking 
scripts to start testing the speed advantages we get from mixing and 
matching all these methods to see how we can tweak everything there. 
Might even find a way to tweak the base string class if 
InternalBlockCopy is faster then that managed memcpy function (which 
would speed up almost everything in Mono that uses String.Substring, 
String.Clone, String.Concat, etc...)

Thanks a bunch...

Time for double byte char and pointer logic fun! -- Zac Bowling
http://zacbowling.com/


----- Message from kornelpal at hotmail.com ---------
    Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 14:40:33 +0100
    From: Kornél Pál <kornelpal at hotmail.com>
Reply-To: Kornél Pál <kornelpal at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Mono-dev] Patch to boost speed of UnicodeEncoding
      To: Zac Bowling <zac at zacbowling.com>, mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com


> Hi,
>
> I think doing something like in the attached draft is faster. No new String
> object is created. Arrays are accessed using pointers. And I think there is
> no use to use a more complicated conversion method for short strings.
>
> This draft is very unsafe. It lacks of any checks and does not perform any
> special character or byte sequence handling.
>
> Note that I haven't done any tests to determine whether using byte pointer
> or using int pointers and shift operations to swap bytes is faster. But
> mixing bytes an ints results in two different code for big and little endian
> encodings while byte swapping can be performed using a single code when
> using only bytes or only ints.
>
> Kornél
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Zac Bowling" <zac at zacbowling.com>
> To: <mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com>
> Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 1:09 PM
> Subject: [Mono-dev] Patch to boost speed of UnicodeEncoding
>
>
>> Alright guys,
>>
>> Here is a cool (and still incomplete) patch to speed up
>> System.Text.UnicodeEncoding I'm working on. Just want to make sure this
>> is sane before I finish it by getting everyone's opinions.
>>
>> I was tinkering with this idea. Since the strings are stored in memory
>> as UTF-16 (UCS 2) already, the idea of converting them with like we do
>> with a while loop, one char at a time, was really bothering me.
>> Directly copying whats in memory seems a little bit more sane. I don't
>> want to make it sound that easy because it isn't (and maybe why it
>> wasn't done like this when it was first written). :-P
>>
>> The biggest problem is that UnicodeEncoding can be bigEndian or
>> littleEndian so I went through the logic and testing to see if the
>> system's endian (with 'BitConverter.IsLittleEndian') matched the endian
>> of the current Encoding class (using the 'bigEndian' bool field) and if
>> it doesn't then use the same method we already use. (Is that right? Is
>> the internal version of utf-16 we use in our strings specific to the
>> endian of the system? I assumed yes here but if it's not, it's a simple
>> change to remark it out.)
>>
>> Also since the memcpy function in String.cs uses some unsafe logic,
>> taking a possible hit for that with a really small string seems silly,
>> so I put in an condition that if the char count is less then or equal
>> to 10 chars, then use the existing method. (Maybe 10 chars should be
>> adjusted or is that idea silly?)
>>
>> Below is an unfinished sample of my idea. Of course I will have to
>> reverse this logic for GetChars() (instead of GetBytes below) and
>> finish the overloads in System.Text.UnicodeEncoding's GetBytes and
>> GetChars methods but I want to see what everything thinks.
>


----- End message from kornelpal at hotmail.com -----