[fpc-devel] Compiler bottlenecks] (was: Blackfin support)

[Jonas Maebe]

On 13 Jul 2010, at 01:46, Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1 at aol.com> wrote:

> Florian Klaempfl schrieb:
>> For me, a much higher priority when doing rewrites might be
>> multithreading nf the compiler itself.
> 
> That's questionable, depending on the real bottlenecks in compiler operation. I suspect that disk I/O is the narrowest bottleneck, that can not be widened by parallel processing.

Unless you are doing a cold compile, the main bottlenecks in the compiler are the memory manager (mostly the allocation of memory, freeing is faster), zero-filling new class instances (and partially resetting the register allocator) and tobject.initinstance.

> It also requires further research, for e.g. the determination of the optimal number of threads, depending on the currently available resources on a concrete machine.

We'd just use the same approach as make: allow the user to specify the number of parallel operations.


Jonas