luau/VM
Arseny Kapoulkine f5303b3dd7
Make table.concat faster (#1243)
table.concat is idiomatic and should be the fastest way to concatenate
all table array elements together, but apparently you can beat it by
using `string.format`, `string.rep` and `table.unpack`:

```lua
string.format(string.rep("%*", #t), table.unpack(t))
```

... this just won't do, so we should fix table.concat performance.

The deficit comes from two places:

- rawgeti overhead followed by other stack accesses, all to extract a
string from what is almost always an in-bounds array lookup
- addlstring overhead in case separator is empty (extra function calls)

This change fixes this by using a fast path for in-bounds array lookup
for a string. Note that `table.concat` also supports numbers (these need
to be converted to strings which is a little cumbersome and has innate
overhead), and out-of-bounds accesses*. In these cases we fall back to
the old implementation.

To trigger out-of-bounds accesses, you need to skip the past-array-end
element (which is nil per array invariant), but this is achievable
because table.concat supports offset+length arguments. This should
almost never come up in practice but the per-element branches et al are
fairly cheap compared to the eventual string copy/alloc anyway.

This change makes table.concat ~2x faster when the separator is empty;
the table.concat benchmark shows +40% gains but it uses a variety of
string separators of different lengths so it doesn't get the full
benefit from this change.

---------

Co-authored-by: vegorov-rbx <75688451+vegorov-rbx@users.noreply.github.com>
2024-04-29 05:19:01 -07:00
..
include Sync to upstream/release/615 (#1175) 2024-03-01 10:45:26 -08:00
src Make table.concat faster (#1243) 2024-04-29 05:19:01 -07:00