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About Metaprogramming speed

Written by matt on June 18th, 2008

In a previous article I took an example of bad metaprogramming and I pushed people to think twice before using metaprogramming.

My main points were that:

  • you might make your code way slower if you don't know what you are doing
  • readability might drop considerably
  • maintainability can become an issue

People left some very good comments about how to write the same module using metaprogramming and keep things fast.

Today Wycats pinged me about this post and told me that the issue was definemethod and that classeval is effectively the same as regular code, it gets evaluated in eval.c, just like regular Ruby code. On the other hand, defined_method has to marshall the proc.

I cleaned up my benchmarks using rbench, added some of the solutions provided to me and obtained the following results:

results

Here is the original/bad metaprogramming example:

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  module MetaTimeDSL

    {:second => 1, 
     :minute => 60, 
     :hour => 3600, 
     :day => [24,:hours], 
     :week => [7,:days], 
     :month => [30,:days], 
     :year => [364.25, :days]}.each do |meth, amount|
      define_method "#{meth}" do
        amount = amount.is_a?(Array) ? amount[0].send(amount[1]) : amount
        self * amount
      end
      alias_method "#{meth}s".intern, "#{meth}"
    end

  end
  Numeric.send :include, MetaTimeDSL

The no metaprogramming module is available there

Refactored:

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  module RefaMetaTimeDSL

  {:second => 1, 
   :minute => 60, 
   :hour => 3600, 
   :day => [24,:hours], 
   :week => [7,:days], 
   :month => [30,:days], 
   :year => [364.25, :days]}.each do |meth, amount|
    self.class_eval <<-RUBY
      def r_#{meth}
        #{amount.is_a?(Array) ? "#{amount[0]}.#{amount[1]}" : "#{amount}"}
      end
      alias_method :r_#{meth}s, :r_#{meth}
    RUBY
  end

end
Numeric.send :include, RefaMetaTimeDSL

the refactor 2 or eval based solution provided by Matt Jones which uses class_eval like the previous refactor.

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  module EvalMetaTimeDSL
    def self.included(base)
      base.class_eval do
        [ [:e_second, 1], 
          [:e_minute, 60], 
          [:e_hour, 3600], 
          [:e_day, [24,:e_hours]], 
          [:e_week, [7,:e_days]], 
          [:e_month, [30,:e_days]], 
          [:e_year, [365.25, :e_days]]].each do |meth, amount|
            amount = amount.is_a?(Array) ? amount[0].send(amount[1]) : amount
            eval "def #{meth}; self*#{amount}; end"
            alias_method "#{meth}s", meth
          end
      end
    end
  end
  Numeric.send :include, EvalMetaTimeDSL

and finally, the "better metaprogramming" version:

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 module GoodMetaTimeDSL

  SECOND  = 1
  MINUTE  = SECOND * 60
  HOUR    = MINUTE * 60
  DAY     = HOUR * 24
  WEEK    = DAY * 7
  MONTH   = DAY * 30
  YEAR    = DAY * 364.25
  
  %w[SECOND MINUTE HOUR DAY WEEK MONTH YEAR].each do |const_name|
      meth = const_name.downcase
      class_eval <<-RUBY 
        def g_#{meth} 
          self * #{const_name} 
        end 
        alias g_#{meth}s g_#{meth} 
      RUBY
  end
end
Numeric.send :include, GoodMetaTimeDSL

Looking at the refactored version by Wycats, you can see he's right and the major issue with the original version was definemethod. Using classeval does make things almost as fast and even faster than the no metaprogramming version.

Interesting enough, the benchmarks show that some methods from the meta modules are faster than the ones from the no meta module. Overall, an optimized metaprogramming can be more or else as fast as a non meta code. Of course, with the new VMs coming up, things might change a little bit depending on the language implementation.

In conclusion, metaprogramming can be as fast as no metaprogramming but that won't help your code readability and maintainability, so make sure to only use this great trick when needed!

p.s: here is the benchmark file if you don't believe me ;)

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4 comments


Comments

  • Emmanuel Oga on 18 Jun 18:05

    The main speed gain comes from changing definemethod with one of the classeval/eval forms. Be careful, you have an error in one of the implementations:

    module RefaMetaTimeDSL
  ...
  def r_#{meth}
    #{amount.is_a?(Array) ? "#{amount[0]}.#{amount[1]}" : "#{amount}"}
  end
end

#The correct form should have been: 
    #{amount.is_a?(Array) ? "#{amount[0]}.#{amount[1]}" : "#{amount} * self"}

  • Emmanuel Oga on 18 Jun 18:13

    Sorry, I don't know if my last comment has been received. You have an error on: RefaMetaTimeDSL

     #{amount.is_a?(Array) ? "#{amount[0]}.#{amount[1]}" : "#{amount}"}

    should be:

     #{amount.is_a?(Array) ? "#{amount[0]}.#{amount[1]}" : "#{amount} * self"}

    So the main speed difference is in using classeval instead of definemethod.

  • ruby licious on 20 Aug 22:35

    Very nice article, I've often wondered about this but never got around to actually benchmark it.

  • Eike Herzbach on 14 Sep 13:05

    Some of your examples have 364.25 days per year, which is wrong.

Comments are closed