30% regression in compile time of tuple-stress benchmark

[alexcrichton]

According to perf.rust-lang.org graphs the tuple-stress benchmark has regressed 30% in compile time lately, pointing to #43554 as the culprit.

I've downloaded the nightly-2017-08-05 toolchain and the nightly-2017-08-06 toolchain where 08-06 has this PR and 08-05 doesn't. The notable differences in time-passes are:

pass	after	before
borrow checking	2.556	0.920
const checking	1.728	0.451
translation	0.798	0.682
expansion	0.168	0.097

cc @eddyb

[jonas-schievink]

The "after" column is faster than "before", did you swap them by accident?

[hanna-kruppe]

It's probably because the test case is almost entirely composed of float literals, and as of #43554 those literals are parsed twice (once with core::num::dec2flt, once with APFloat) as a sanity check.

[alexcrichton]

@jonas-schievink oops yes

[eddyb]

Only constant checking and MIR building should do the parsing though. Expansion, for example, couldn't possibly be affected - I suspect there's more than one factor hiding in here.

[eddyb]

Another thing is that "const checking" is quadratic in the number of expression nodes (which are considered to be constant) that are part of the same subtree, as const-evaluation isn't cached (yet).
I could try doing that (and/or cache the results of parsing float literals).

[nikomatsakis]

triage: P-high

Assigning to @eddyb to decide if there is something to be concerned about here or not. =)

[eddyb]

On the graph "expansion" has a small random jump from 0.25 to 0.28 but then it goes back down to 0.25, so that's probably a false positive elsewhere too.

The culprits (adding up to most of the total change):

• "const checking": 0.85 -> 3.48
• "borrow checking" (actually MIR building): 1.75 -> 4.51

Sadly, my idea for caching const-evaluation wouldn't do much for MIR building, have to look further.

[eddyb]

The graph looks pretty good - still about half a second more, but the regression is much less worse.
@alexcrichton Are you satisfied with this outcome? Or do you want to reopen the issue?

[alexcrichton]

Oh no I was personally satisfied with any outcome, I just figured it'd be good to track regressions as they came up!

Thanks for the fix @eddyb!

[shepmaster]

IMO, if reopening the issue makes @eddyb perform another "5x speed increase" then we should trick them into doing such 😇