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wasmtime/crates/c-api
Alex Crichton bcf3544924 Optimize Func::call and its C API (#3319)
* Optimize `Func::call` and its C API

This commit is an alternative to #3298 which achieves effectively the
same goal of optimizing the `Func::call` API as well as its C API
sibling of `wasmtime_func_call`. The strategy taken here is different
than #3298 though where a new API isn't created, rather a small tweak to
an existing API is done. Specifically this commit handles the major
sources of slowness with `Func::call` with:

* Looking up the type of a function, to typecheck the arguments with and
  use to guide how the results should be loaded, no longer hits the
  rwlock in the `Engine` but instead each `Func` contains its own
  `FuncType`. This can be an unnecessary allocation for funcs not used
  with `Func::call`, so this is a downside of this implementation
  relative to #3298. A mitigating factor, though, is that instance
  exports are loaded lazily into the `Store` and in theory not too many
  funcs are active in the store as `Func` objects.

* Temporary storage is amortized with a long-lived `Vec` in the `Store`
  rather than allocating a new vector on each call. This is basically
  the same strategy as #3294 only applied to different types in
  different places. Specifically `wasmtime::Store` now retains a
  `Vec<u128>` for `Func::call`, and the C API retains a `Vec<Val>` for
  calling `Func::call`.

* Finally, an API breaking change is made to `Func::call` and its type
  signature (as well as `Func::call_async`). Instead of returning
  `Box<[Val]>` as it did before this function now takes a
  `results: &mut [Val]` parameter. This allows the caller to manage the
  allocation and we can amortize-remove it in `wasmtime_func_call` by
  using space after the parameters in the `Vec<Val>` we're passing in.
  This change is naturally a breaking change and we'll want to consider
  it carefully, but mitigating factors are that most embeddings are
  likely using `TypedFunc::call` instead and this signature taking a
  mutable slice better aligns with `Func::new` which receives a mutable
  slice for the results.

Overall this change, in the benchmark of "call a nop function from the C
API" is not quite as good as #3298. It's still a bit slower, on the
order of 15ns, because there's lots of capacity checks around vectors
and the type checks are slightly less optimized than before. Overall
though this is still significantly better than today because allocations
and the rwlock to acquire the type information are both avoided. I
personally feel that this change is the best to do because it has less
of an API impact than #3298.

* Rebase issues
2021-09-21 14:07:05 -05:00
..

Wasmtime's C API

For more information you can find the documentation for this library online.