[Cython] CEP1000: Native dispatch through callables

[Robert Bradshaw]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 10:26 AM, Robert Bradshaw <robertwb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 4:59 AM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn
> <d.s.seljebotn at astro.uio.no> wrote:
>> On 04/13/2012 01:38 PM, Stefan Behnel wrote:

>>> That would only apply at a per-module level, though, so it would require
>>> an
>>> indirection for the signature IDs. But it would avoid a global registry.
>>>
>>> Another idea would be to set the signature ID field to 0 at the beginning
>>> and call a C-API function to let the current runtime assign an ID>  0,
>>> unique for the currently running application. Then every user would only
>>> have to parse the signature once to adapt to the respective ID and could
>>> otherwise branch based on it directly.
>>>
>>> For Cython, we could generate a static ID variable for each typed call
>>> that
>>> we found in the sources. When encountering a C signature on a callable,
>>> either a) the ID variable is still empty (initial case), then we parse the
>>> signature to see if it matches the expected signature. If it does, we
>>> assign the corresponding ID to the static ID variable and issue a direct
>>> call. If b) the ID field is already set (normal case), we compare the
>>> signature IDs directly and issue a C call it they match. If the IDs do not
>>> match, we issue a normal Python call.
>
> If I understand correctly, you're proposing
>
> struct {
>  char* sig;
>  long id;
> } sig_t;
>
> Where comparison would (sometimes?) compute id from sig by augmenting
> a global counter and dict? Might be expensive to bootstrap, but
> eventually all relevant ids would be filled in and it would be quick.
> Interesting. I wonder what the performance penalty would be over
> assuming id is statically computed lots of the time, and using that to
> compare against fixed values. And there's memory locality issues as
> well.

To clarify, I'd really like to have the following as fast as possible:

if (callable.sig.id == X) {
   // yep, that's what I thought
} else {
   // generic call
}

Alternatively, one can imagine wanting to do:

switch (callable.sig.id) {
    case X:
        // I can do this
    case Y:
        // this is common and fast as well
    ...
    default:
        // generic call
}

There is some question about how promotion should work (e.g. should
this flexibility reside in the caller or the callee (or both, though
that could result in a quadratic number of comparisons)?)

- Robert