[stringtemplate-interest] Raw speed!

[Terence Parr]

On Oct 13, 2005, at 8:48 AM, VAUCHER Laurent wrote:

>   Hi.
>
>   I've tried StringTemplate yesterday and am already falling in love
> with it. I won't enumerate all its advantages, but will instead  
> raise a
> point about performance. The bare fact is that the library "as is"  
> is a
> bit slow for my current needs. I think there are several causes :
>
>   1 ) the way properties are retrieved, for standard classes (isXXX,
> getXXX or field access) is not recorded and has to be recomputed on  
> each
> access ;

Yes, i have that on the to-do list :)

>   2 ) property access must use reflection ;

That is because ST cannot know anything about types

>   3 ) compared to JSP, StringTemplate's are evaluated, not compiled.

Yep.  The language in the $...$ expressions can be rather  
complicated.  I suppose I could build a generated version like JSP.   
That is lower priority that the property access update though I suppose.

>   I made a quick hack to fix the first point (thanks to/for the
> open-sourceness of the lib) and observed a direct 25% decrease in
> elasped time. Nice!

Nice!  So we should record a map (type,propertyName)- 
 >ReflectionObject so that if I ever see User object again and name  
property, it already has the reflection object necessary to get the  
field or whatever.

Is that what you did?

>   But I'm still not satisfied and, alas, points 2 and 3, which are
> linked, cannot be fixed so easily.

True ;)

>   The next step in optimization would be a kind of
> JIT-template-compiler. If I follow that road, I think the ASM library
> could be a useful help (http://asm.objectweb.org).

Would be easier to just generate java and compile it like JSP. :)

>   What do you think?

I think you have good ideas!  Vous etes tres malin! :)

Ter