Less cgo overhead in Go 1.8
2017-02-15
One spare afternoon a few months ago I read through the cgo calling code in the Go runtime. There were two defers that could be merged into one, so I did.
Combined with Austin's improvements to defer's overall performance (CL 29656), the 146ns call to an empty C function in Go 1.7 is now a 56ns call in Go 1.8:
name old time/op new time/op delta
CgoNoop-8 146ns ± 1% 56ns ± 6% -61.57% (p=0.000 n=25+30)
This is a good reminder to me of the important of making time for idle rummaging around in code. For the past six months I have done very little of it, as the piles of well-defined work I have seemed too important. But looking back over what came of that work, this idle afternoon is probably the most impactful thing I have done recently.
golang.org/cl/30080