Re: [TCLCORE] Ideas for an optimization project

[Donal K. F. <don...@ma...>]

Daniel Hans wrote:
> The aim of my project is to improve effectiveness (time, memory usage, etc.)
> of a particular aspect of
> an open source program. Then I have to show that my solution is really somehow
> better than the existing one by running some tests or something. That would be
> appreciated to use for example some profiling tools like Google Profiler or
> gprof. I would like my project to be up to 1500-2500 lines of code.

Chiseling away at the cost of a few of the key structures in Tcl would
be a good thing. For example, it would be nice if the cost of namespaces
was lower, which Tcl 8.6 uses much more heavily than previous versions.
The runtime stack (the entity that is allocated new for each coroutine)
might be another area that could do with attention. Actually, one of the
best things for the Tcl Maintainers to know would be where the expensive
allocations are; evidence-based optimization is better than going on
hunches, even for experts.

There's also plenty of room for improvement on speed, but that's rather
more difficult to do as a small project.

Donal.