[Liboil] Re: Questions about liboil

[Adam D. Moss]

Hi there!

David Schleef wrote:
>  - Only profile implementations for a particular function class
>    when it is used (or requested).

I rather like this idea for a different reason - at the moment
the implicit benchmarking of ALL liboil implementations of ALL
function classes makes the linker's reachability analysis simply
link the entirety of liboil when only a couple of classes of
function are used, which isn't overly lovely for static/embedded
builds (of course, that's of almost no concern for a .so).

>  - Have an on-disk cache of profile times.  Useful in many cases,
>    but needs careful thought on diskless systems.

Not quite so hot on this idea - I suspect liboil's list of
implementations would have to be rather huge to amortize the
cost of the IO and parsing compared with just benchmarking
everything each time, but more importantly I'm uneasy at the
idea that liboil-using apps might start to crash or perform
suboptimally if I were to upgrade my machine or access my
$HOME from another architecture (or a different implementation
of the same architecture).

Cheers,
--Adam