I have a central routine (perform_transfer_rect_clipping) which is called very often as well as the union and intersection routines of Rect for which I wrote the traits And, AndAssign, Or, OrAssign.
I was wondering:
What is the best strategy for passing the Rect arguments in the several functions, regarding performance?
Currently they are all passed by reference. The size of Rect is 16 bytes.
I am still in the proces of learning the language...
If anyone has suggetions to improve the performance of the clipping routine, let me know
Although I have no complaints about hte performance. Just interested.
Any other suggestions welcome as well.
There are several levels on which this question can be answered. Please consider all of them:
As a default, you should prefer to pass values that small directly, not by reference. 16 bytes fits in just 2 registers on most common (64-bit) platforms today, and that is much cheaper than accessing memory. And when you do pass a larger value, the ABI usually says that it will be passed by reference anyway. So, forcing a reference does not likely gain you anything.
But, when your functions are inlined, what the function signature says stops mattering — the code of the two functions is combined and they are optimized as a single unit. So, inlining means the choice is unlikely to matter, except when a function is not inlined (and at that point, the function is likely large enough, and takes long enough to execute, that the details of argument passing are insignificant).
But, if you care about performance, you must write benchmarks and try both options. This sort of micro-optimization is full of extremely surprising results; the effect of such a small change to the program cannot be predicted reliably. Run benchmarks; study the assembly output; determine empirically what choice is better.
All that said, I also recommend passing by value as a matter of style. Your code will read better without extra & and *, and you probably won't have any meaningful performance difference from sticking to that.
Thanks!
I also prefer by value, but not for big structs of course.
Benchmarking I never did (except measuring myself in releasemode).
The assembler output in (for example) rust playground I cannot read. Impossible to see what is what.
I changed - for now - these rects to "by value" and now the first task is to get my game running. Almost there...