Dear OCaml users,
consider the following microbenchmark:
<snip>
class s (z : string) (y : int) (x : int) =
object method z = z method y = y method x = x
end
type t = { x : int; y : int; z : string}
let foo_s _ =
(new s) "Example" 0 1
let foo_t _ = {x=1; y=0; z="Example"}
let one_s _ = (foo_s ())#x
let one_t _ = (foo_t ()).x
let fac =
let rec fac n =
let f =
let rec f n a = if n <= 1 then a else f (n - (one_s ())) (n * a) in f (* change one_t to one_s or vice-versa *)
in
f n 1 in
fac
let bench =
let rec bench n a =
if n <= 0
then a
else (let x = a && ((fac 20) == (20 * (fac 19))) in bench (n - 1) x) in
bench
let test = bench 10000000 true
let main _ = test
</snip>
If I run it with ocamlopt 4.05.0+flambda and -O3, the version that uses one_s takes about 7.5s whereas the one with one_t uses 0.35s. I know that object method lookup is more costly than records, of course. This particular case baffles me, though. Why is the class not completely inlined?
Also as a related question, is there a way to have the lookup semantics of methods without the open recursion part? That is, can I have a class that consists of values, not methods? It would love to have open tuples in some cases. For example, I'd like to write a function that takes a tuple of any length, because it only needs the first element.