Re: [boost] The need for a 1.35.1 release

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-06-17 12:52:26

brass goowy wrote:
> David Abrahams writes:

> I have a bit of a beef with the efficient part at least in places --
> http://webEbenezer.net/comparison.html.
> Preliminary results on Boost 1.35 and MSVC9 show only minor
> differences from the 1.34.1 and MSVC8

I did take a cursory look at above page which show a
performance difference in two simple examples.  There
are a couple of problems with these small tests.

The serialization library defaults for versioning and object
tracking are used.  Versioning provides the facitly for remaining
backward compatibility with older archives.  Tracking is used
to permit reloading of pointers and to elmininate redudency
in archives.  Both of these features have a cost.  Looking
at the "ebenezer" code it doesn't look like these thinngs
are supported.  So I'm skeptical of the utility of this
particula comparison.  It might a little more useful to
experiment with the boost serialization traits to turn
off features for these types so that timings might be
more comparable.  But still I think, that such a limited
set of tests can provide only limited insight.

Never the less, I was interested in these results when
you first posted them - and I continue to be.  The
serializaiton libray was designed to take maximal
advantage of compile time code generation.  The
basic sequence of operations should be the same
in both programs,  So I would hope that there be little
difference in results of tests such as yours.  Any significant differences
should be attributable to one or more of the following:

a) Complier abstraction penalty
b) test artifacts - e.g. tests running different feature sets.
c) suboptimal implemenations of serialization for certain types
c) bugs in the code.  From time to time these have been
discovered and fixed.

Finally, we are slowly making progress in implementing
profiling tests which we hope will isolate any
performance bottlenecks.

Robert Ramey