RE: [cdt-dev] Symbol translation concerns

[Thomas Fletcher <ThomasF@xxxxxxx>]

OK, doesn't seem like anyone has an opinion, I'll put the changes in
and we'll see what happens.

Thanks,
 Thomas 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Thomas Fletcher
> Sent: January 9, 2006 1:45 PM
> To: CDT General developers list.
> Subject: [cdt-dev] Symbol translation concerns
> 
> Hey all,
> 
>   I'm currently doing some work in the area of the symbol 
> translator.  I'm particularly looking at improving a few 
> performance bottlenecks that are easily attacked and then 
> looking at ways to get rid of the larger issues (ie can we 
> have a native parser for the symbols instead of 
> addr2line/cppfilt combinations).
> 
>   I have a couple of questions to see if I can tickle the 
> larger community memory since I'd rather not break things 
> that are working.  I don't think that this will, but I'm 
> probing anyway since there is a collective memory here.  The 
> first target is to make a few changes to the Elf/ElfHelper classes:
> 
> 1- The SymbolSortCompare class converts all of its symbols to 
> lowercase (via
> .toLowerCase())
> and then performs a comparison.  On large symbol files 
> (anything over a couple of megs) this can create a flurry of 
> object creations.  I'm going to change this code to not 
> convert the strings to lower case but instead (initially) use 
> compareToIgnoreCase().  The performance gains observed are 
> not insignificant:
> 
> Original (time to sort the symbol array used by the ElfHelper class):
> - Sorting 53580 symbols took 6203ms
> Modified (traded toLowerCase for compareToIgnoreCase)
> - Sorting 53580 symbols took 828ms
> 
> 2- The second "thing" that the SymbolSortCompare class is to 
> strip out any leading underscores.  I'm not sure what the 
> rationale is for doing this but it seems wrong to me to be 
> arbitrary ripping out leading underscores (__start != _start 
> != start).
> 
> Looking at the bigger picture, the general use of the symbols 
> does not seem to require them being sorted at all, and since 
> the behaviour is not documented I'm tempted to toss the lot 
> .. but baby steps first.
> 
> Proposal:
> - I'm going to switch the sorting to continue to be case 
> in-sensitive but using the compareToIgnoreCase
> - I'm going to remove the leading underscore "filtering" of 
> the sorter.
> This may
> have some relation to PR 87698, I'm still looking into that.
> 
> Thanks,
>  Thomas
>  
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