- rewritten decoder; interpreted decoder is bytecode-based,
JIT decoder no longer falls back to the interpreter.
- C++ improvements: C++11-compatible iterators, upb::reffed_ptr
for RAII refcounting, better upcast/downcast support.
- removed the gross upb_value abstraction from public upb.h.
Major changes:
- Got rid of all bytestream interfaces in favor of
using regular handlers.
- new Pipeline object represents a upb pipeline, does
bump allocation internally to manage memory.
- proto2 support now can handle extensions.
Many things have changed and been simplified.
The memory-management story for upb_def and upb_handlers
is much more robust; upb_def and upb_handlers should be
fairly stable interfaces now. There is still much work
to do for the runtime component (upb_sink).
Many improvements, too many to mention. One significant
perf regression warrants investigation:
omitfp.parsetoproto2_googlemessage1.upb_jit: 343 -> 252 (-26.53)
plain.parsetoproto2_googlemessage1.upb_jit: 334 -> 251 (-24.85)
25% regression for this benchmark is bad, but since I don't think
there's any fundamental design issue that caused it I'm going to
go ahead with the commit anyway. Can investigate and fix later.
Other benchmarks were neutral or showed slight improvement.
Includes are now via upb/foo.h.
Files specific to the protobuf format are
now in upb/pb (the core library is concerned
with message definitions, handlers, and
byte streams, but knows nothing about any
particular serializationf format).
It can successfully parse SpeedMessage1.
Preliminary results: 750MB/s on Core2 2.4GHz.
This number is 2.5x proto2.
This isn't apples-to-apples, because
proto2 is parsing to a struct and we are
just doing stream parsing, but for apps
that are currently using proto2, this is the
improvement they would see if they could
move to stream-based processing.
Unfortunately perf-regression-test.py is
broken, and I'm not 100% sure why. It would
be nice to fix it first (to ensure that
there are no performance regressions for
the table-based decoder) but I'm really
impatient to get the JIT checked in.
This doesn't reflect any material change in
how I will be working on upb, and I have no
problem making this change. It's still open
source under the BSD license, and I'll still
be working on it well beyond the hours that
constitute a normal job.
This is a significant change to the upb_stream
protocol, and should hopefully be the last
significant change.
All callbacks are now registered ahead-of-time
instead of having delegated callbacks registered
at runtime, which makes it much easier to
aggressively optimize ahead-of-time (like with a
JIT).
Other impacts of this change:
- You no longer need to have loaded descriptor.proto
as a upb_def to load other descriptors! This means
the special-case code we used for bootstrapping is
no longer necessary, and we no longer need to link
the descriptor for descriptor.proto into upb.
- A client can now register any upb_value as what
will be delivered to their value callback, not
just a upb_fielddef*. This should allow for other
clients to get more bang out of the streaming
decoder.
This change unfortunately causes a bit of a performance
regression -- I think largely due to highly
suboptimal code that GCC generates when structs
are returned by value. See:
http://blog.reverberate.org/2011/03/19/when-a-compilers-slow-code-actually-bites-you/
On the other hand, once we have a JIT this should
no longer matter.
Performance numbers:
plain.parsestream_googlemessage1.upb_table: 374 -> 396 (5.88)
plain.parsestream_googlemessage2.upb_table: 616 -> 449 (-27.11)
plain.parsetostruct_googlemessage1.upb_table_byref: 268 -> 269 (0.37)
plain.parsetostruct_googlemessage1.upb_table_byval: 215 -> 204 (-5.12)
plain.parsetostruct_googlemessage2.upb_table_byref: 307 -> 281 (-8.47)
plain.parsetostruct_googlemessage2.upb_table_byval: 297 -> 272 (-8.42)
omitfp.parsestream_googlemessage1.upb_table: 423 -> 410 (-3.07)
omitfp.parsestream_googlemessage2.upb_table: 679 -> 483 (-28.87)
omitfp.parsetostruct_googlemessage1.upb_table_byref: 287 -> 282 (-1.74)
omitfp.parsetostruct_googlemessage1.upb_table_byval: 226 -> 219 (-3.10)
omitfp.parsetostruct_googlemessage2.upb_table_byref: 315 -> 298 (-5.40)
omitfp.parsetostruct_googlemessage2.upb_table_byval: 297 -> 287 (-3.37)
upb_inttable() now supports a "compact" operation that will
decide on an array size and put all entries with small enough
keys into the array part for faster lookup.
Also exposed the upb_itof_ent structure and put a few useful
values there, so they are one fewer pointer chase away.
Unfortunately this degrades hash table lookup performance by
about 8%, which affects the streaming benchmark for googlemessage1
by about 5%. We could get this back at the cost of some memory,
but it would be nice to avoid that.
There is significant refactoring here, as well as some more trivial
name changes. upb_msg has become upb_msgdef, to reflect the fact
that a upb_msg is not *itself* a message, it describes a message.
There are other renamings, such as upb_parse_state -> upb_stream_parser.
More significantly, the upb_msg class and parser have been refactored
to reflect my recent realization about how memory management should
work. upb_msg now has no memory management, and a memory mangement
scheme (that works beautifully with multiple language runtimes) will
be layered on top of it.
This iteration has the new, read-only upb_msg. upb_mm_msg (a
memory-managed message class) will come in the next change.