Module: Stupidedi::TailCall

Defined in:
lib/stupidedi/tail_call.rb

Overview

This performs tail call optimization on methods declared by the programmer to be in tail call form. It can’t actually verify if they are, so be sure to write tests for your methods.

Because the optimizations are done in pure Ruby, the benefits are somewhat limited – the stack doesn’t grow but it only begins to outperform the unoptimized code only when the stack reaches a depth of about 5000 frames. Before that threshold, it actually performs significantly worse – about 70% slower at 50 stack frames, and nearly 100% slower at 10 stack frames.

Benchmarks

o = Optimized.new
u = Unoptimized.new

[10, 50, 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10000, 50000].each do |n|
  Benchmark.bm do |x|
    x.report("#{n} optim = ") { puts(begin; o.fact(n).size; rescue; $! end) }
    x.report("#{n} plain = ") { puts(begin; u.fact(n).size; rescue; $! end) }
  end
end

With 10000 stack frames the optimized version runs about 40% faster. These benchmark results were produced by Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7

     n       tco     plain    ratio
------------------------------------
    10    0.7918    0.0045    0.0056
    50    0.2476    0.0674    0.2723
   100    0.5207    0.2008    0.3856
   500    2.5064    1.0426    0.4160
  1000    5.8834    3.2413    0.5509
  5000   42.5210   41.7398    0.9816
 10000   14.5664   20.3000    1.3936
 25000    9.3729  (stack err)

It seems like this tradeoff makes sense only for methods we know are going to consistently generate thousands of stack frames. We’re probably better off using Ruby YARV (1.9) in all cases though, since it performs faster in general and it supposedly implements tail call optimization in the interpreter.

Examples:

class Unoptimized
  def fact(n, accumulator = 1)
    (n < 2) ? accumulator : fact(n-1, n * accumulator)
  end
end

class Optimized
  include TailCall

  def fact(n, accumulator = 1)
    (n < 2) ? accumulator : fact(n-1, n * accumulator)
  end

  optimize_tailcall :fact
end

See Also:

Defined Under Namespace

Modules: ClassMethods

Class Method Summary collapse

Class Method Details

.included(base) ⇒ Object 



66
67
68
 
# File 'lib/stupidedi/tail_call.rb', line 66

def self.included(base)
  base.extend(ClassMethods)
end