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Performance in debug mode degraded by slow std::string::const_iterator constructor

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#298 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
performance

Research direction

No file or test is named in the issue. Start by locating Boost.Parser's iterator-taking interfaces and reproducing the reported MSVC debug profile; done means changing the justified pass-by-value arguments without altering parser behavior and confirming the debug performance improvement.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Unfortunately, boost.parser is very slow in debug mode.
Fortunately, this would be rather easy to change.

I have colleagues complaining because the Boost.Parser based parser takes forever in debug mode. I fired up VTune and quickly found that more than 60% of the total runtime is spent in the constructor and destructor of std::string::const_iterator. Boost.Parser is written under the assumption (it seems) that copying an iterator is basically free, which is probably true in release mode. But in MSVC/Debug it is a very expensive operation.

Looking at the code, I got the impression that in most places, nothing would be lost passing the iterators as const-ref instead of by-value. And the debug runtime would dramatically improve. Would you be open to change to const-ref for most iterator arguments? If so, I'd consider creating a Pull request doing this. Or am I missing a use case where the pass-by-value is beneficial?

Dominant language
C++
Stars
182
Forks
28
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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