Performance

[ArneBachmann]

Sorry for not being very constructive, but the Coconut compiler|s performance is somewhat abysmal.
For a 500 LOC tool it takes about 10 seconds on my Linux laptop, and 15s on my 4 years old Windows PC.
This is simply too slow for the typical Python REPL testing/prototyping workflow.

Any ideas on how to improve on speed?

[evhub]

@ArneBachmann See the FAQ entry on how do I achieve maximum performance. If you just use cPyparsing or PyPy, you can get a lot of the way towards significantly improved performance.

In the long run, #299 is my current best bet for how to improve base performance, though it'll be a big undertaking.

[ArneBachmann]

I'm reaching 15s per compile for 900 LOC. It becomes harder and harder to test and debug. Splitting the code into many different files is no option either, due to #320

[evhub]

@ArneBachmann Yeah, I'll definitely prioritize trying to get some work done on this front as soon as I get a chance, and #320 is on my short list of things to do before the next release.

[evhub]

@ArneBachmann Try cloning and installing the new computation-graph branch and see if it helps with your performance issues! If you do, definitely comment on the computation graph pull request and let me know how it worked out for you.

[ArneBachmann]

Hint: to update to a development branch, you need to
sudo pip[3] uninstall coconut (several times to remove all old versions)
Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/evhub/coconut.git
git pull origin computation-graph
sudo python3 setup.py clean build install

Replace calls to coconut by coconut-develop (and -run).

In my case this leads to:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/coconut-develop", line 9, in <module>
    load_entry_point('coconut-develop==1.3.1.post0.dev8', 'console_scripts', 'coconut-develop')()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 558, in load_entry_point
    return get_distribution(dist).load_entry_point(group, name)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2681, in load_entry_point
    raise ImportError("Entry point %r not found" % ((group, name),))
ImportError: Entry point ('console_scripts', 'coconut-develop') not found

[ArneBachmann]

Any hint on how to install the developer version? Is there a guide in the official docs somewhere?

[evhub]

@ArneBachmann Coconut doesn't support installation via setup.py--you must use pip. Try make wipe to remove previous versions of Coconut, then make install to install the version you just cloned.

[ArneBachmann]

Just tried installing that on the train at 200km/h downloading all kinds of dependencies that the mainline coconut doesn't require, and saw that it was actually installing into Python 2, while I used to install coconut always into Python 3. Anyway it somehow worked, but I couldn't detect any speed improvements so far. It takes 30 seconds to compile a 1000 lines coconut file. I'll keep you posted.

[evhub]

@ArneBachmann Thanks for trying it out! If you want to install it locally on Python 3, try pip3 install -e . (or python3 -m pip install -e .). By default, make install just installs into whatever the default python is, 2 or 3.

[ArneBachmann]

That did the trick. I'm not entirely sure, but coconut feels even slower now :-( it was 10s before, and is 20-30s now I think. Should I try pypy instead? Had good experience with in in the past.

[ArneBachmann]

Ah, seems like --strict make compilation much slower. Need to test again without.