Re: [gnugo-devel] do_play_move speedup

[Gunnar Farneback]

Evan wrote:
> This patch speeds up do_play_move by about 15% on my machine.  Inlining
> the function cause ~5% speedup, and the rest is from taking more care with
> conditionals and doing some precomputation.  Anyway, this is the result of
> my initial experiments with the profiler.  Hope it helps.

Except that we can't use the inlining the patch looks good. I'll add
it later tonight or tomorrow.

There has been some recent discussion on the list about inline, but it
wasn't very conclusive. I think the major issues are:

* Inline is a new feature in c99 and we are committed to c89.
* Pre-c99 compilers often have an inline extension, but not
  necessarily compatible with the c99 inline.
* There are some limits to what can be inlined.

A precondition for using inline at all is that we can determine
whether it's supported through the configure mechanism. There's some
research left to do in this area.

/Gunnar