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Loading FixedPointNumbers invalidates ~7,700 precompiled method instances (7x slower first mtkcompile)

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
julia
Domain
performance

Research direction

Start with mwe.jl and the SnoopCompile invalidation measurements, then inspect the listed methods in src/fixed.jl, src/normed.jl, and src/FixedPointNumbers.jl. Compare narrower signatures or other changes against the 7,708 invalidations and mtkcompile timings, while checking that FixedPointNumbers behavior remains correct; done means reducing the loading impact without regressions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Summary

Loading FixedPointNumbers into a session that already has ModelingToolkit loaded invalidates
7,708 precompiled method instances and makes the first mtkcompile call take 23.59 s
instead of 0.04 s
— a huge slowdown in a script that never uses a fixed-point number.

Most users meet this indirectly: ColorTypes/Colors depend on FixedPointNumbers, so any
Makie-based plotting next to ModelingToolkit pays this cost on the first model build.

MWE

# mwe.jl
using ModelingToolkit
using ModelingToolkit: t_nounits as t, D_nounits as D
if get(ENV, "LOAD_FPN", "0") == "1"
    @eval using FixedPointNumbers      # <-- the only difference
end
@variables x(t)=1.0 y(t)=0.0
@named sys = System([D(x) ~ y, D(y) ~ -x], t)
t0 = time(); mtkcompile(sys); println("mtkcompile: ", round(time()-t0, digits=2), " s")
(test) pkg> st
Status `~/test/Project.toml`
  [53c48c17] FixedPointNumbers v0.9.1
  [961ee093] ModelingToolkit v11.41.0
$ julia --startup-file=no --project=. mwe.jl
mtkcompile: 0,04 s

$ LOAD_FPN=1 julia --startup-file=no --project=. mwe.jl
mtkcompile: 23.59 s

As a control, loading a package of comparable size that does not add methods to Base
generics (using LaTeXStrings) leaves the time unchanged at 0.04 s, so this is not the
general cost of loading a package.

Attribution

using SnoopCompileCore
using ModelingToolkit
invs = @snoop_invalidations using FixedPointNumbers;
using SnoopCompile
length(uinvalidated(invs))   # 7708, from 15 culprit methods

Ranked by countchildren:

children method
14312 promote_rule(::Type{Fixed{T1,f1}}, ::Type{Fixed{T2,f2}}) where {T1,T2,f1,f2} — src/fixed.jl:199
3556 length(r::AbstractUnitRange{N}) where {T<:Unsigned, N<:Normed{T}} — src/normed.jl:304
3089 ceil(::Type{Ti}, x::Normed) where Ti<:Integer — src/normed.jl:277
1668 showarg(io::IO, a::Array{T}, toplevel) where T<:FixedPoint — src/FixedPointNumbers.jl:279
403 reduce_first(::typeof(Base.add_sum), x::FixedPoint) — src/FixedPointNumbers.jl:296
109 -(x::X) where X<:FixedPoint — src/FixedPointNumbers.jl:233

None of these are type piracy — every one is dispatching on a FixedPointNumbers type. The
cost seems to come from adding methods to widely-inferred Base generics (promote_rule,
length, ceil, convert), which discards inference results in already-loaded packages
that call those generics on non-concrete argument types.

Question

Is there room to narrow any of these signatures, or is this something that has to be fixed
on the consuming side (or in Base)? I am mostly filing this for the record, since the
measured impact is large and I could not find an existing issue about it. Happy to run
further measurements if that helps.

Versions

Julia 1.12.7 (Linux, x86_64), FixedPointNumbers 0.8.6, ModelingToolkit 11.17.0,
SnoopCompile 3.2.9.

Dominant language
Julia
Stars
95
Forks
38
Avg merge
1d 7m
Merged PRs (30d)
4

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