Go Data Structures: Interfaces - 3

Memory Optimizations

The space used by the implementation described above can be optimized in two complementary ways.

First, if the interface type involved is empty—it has no methods—then the itable serves no purpose except to hold the pointer to the original type. In this case, the itable can be dropped and the value can point at the type directly:

Whether an interface type has methods is a static property—either the type in the source code says interface{} or it says interace{ methods... }—so the compiler knows which representation is in use at each point in the program.

Second, if the value associated with the interface value can fit in a single machine word, there's no need to introduce the indirection or the heap allocation. If we define Binary32 to be like Binary but implemented as a uint32, it could be stored in an interface value by keeping the actual value in the second word:

Whether the actual value is being pointed at or inlined depends on the size of the type. The compiler arranges for the functions listed in the type's method table (which get copied into the itables) to do the right thing with the word that gets passed in. If the receiver type fits in a word, it is used directly; if not, it is dereferenced. The diagrams show this: in the Binary version far above, the method in the itable is (*Binary).String, while in the Binary32 example, the method in the itable is Binary32.String not (*Binary32).String.

Of course, empty interfaces holding word-sized (or smaller) values can take advantage of both optimizations:

Method Lookup Performance

Smalltalk and the many dynamic systems that have followed it perform a method lookup every time a method gets called. For speed, many implementations use a simple one-entry cache at each call site, often in the instruction stream itself. In a multithreaded program, these caches must be managed carefully, since multiple threads could be at the same call site simultaneously. Even once the races have been avoided, the caches would end up being a source of memory contention.

Because Go has the hint of static typing to go along with the dynamic method lookups, it can move the lookups back from the call sites to the point when the value is stored in the interface. For example, consider this code snippet:

  var any interface{}  // initialized elsewhere
  s := any.(Stringer)  // dynamic conversion
  for i := 0; i < 100; i++ {
       fmt.Println(s.String())
  }

In Go, the itable gets computed (or found in a cache) during the assignment on line 2; the dispatch for the s.String() call executed on line 4 is a couple of memory fetches and a single indirect call instruction.

In contrast, the implementation of this program in a dynamic language like Smalltalk (or JavaScript, or Python, or ...) would do the method lookup at line 4, which in a loop repeats needless work. The cache mentioned earlier makes this less expensive than it might be, but it's still more expensive than a single indirect call instruction.

Of course, this being a blog post, I don't have any numbers to back up this discussion, but it certainly seems like the lack of memory contention would be a big win in a heavily parallel program, as is being able to move the method lookup out of tight loops. Also, I'm talking about the general architecture, not the specifics o the implementation: the latter probably has a few constant factor optimizations still available.

More Information

The interface runtime support is in $GOROOT/src/pkg/runtime/iface.c. There's much more to say about interfaces (we haven't even seen an example of a pointer receiver yet) and the type descriptors (they power reflection in addition to the interface runtime) but those will have to wait for future posts.

Supporting code (x.go):

package main

import (
 "fmt"
 "strconv"
)

type Stringer interface {
 String() string
}

type Binary uint64

func (i Binary) String() string {
 return strconv.Uitob64(i.Get(), 2)
}

func (i Binary) Get() uint64 {
 return uint64(i)
}

func main() {
 b := Binary(200)
 s := Stringer(b)
 fmt.Println(s.String())
}

Selected output of 8g -S x.go:

0045 (x.go:25) LEAL    s+-24(SP),BX
0046 (x.go:25) MOVL    4(BX),BP
0047 (x.go:25) MOVL    BP,(SP)
0048 (x.go:25) MOVL    (BX),BX
0049 (x.go:25) MOVL    20(BX),BX
0050 (x.go:25) CALL    ,BX

The LEAL loads the address of s into the register BX. (The notation n(SP) describes the word in memory at SP+n. 0(SP) can be shortened to (SP).) The next two MOVL instructions fetch the value from the second word in the interface and store it as the first function call argument, 0(SP). The final two MOVL instructions fetch the itable and then the function pointer from the itable, in preparation for calling that function.

转载于:https://my.oschina.net/bluven/blog/180271