[M3announce] New experimental Text module

[Rodney M. Bates]

There is an experimental replacement for the various
library code involving the type TEXT, now checked in
the CVS repository, in cm3/m3-libs/m3core/src/text,
under branch devel_m3core_text_newtext_branch. There
is a test program for it in cm3/m3-libs/m3core/tests/newtext.

Approach:

I tried to see how much I could improve the performance of CM3 TEXT
operations by changing the algorithms only, leaving the data
structure, both declarations and invariants, unchanged.  This presents
minimum disruption elsewhere.  Both the pickle code and existing
pickle files will be unaffected, along with other things that use
pickles.

Changes:

I eliminated as much recursion as possible, converting some instances
of recursion to tail-recursions, and then converting all
tail-recursion instances to iteration.  Recursion remains when:

1) There is true nonlinear recursion.  This happens in only one place
    in concatenation.  Here, I did the recursion on the shorter (and
    thus hopefully shallower) side of the tree.

2) Where necessary to avoid the chance of creating an identical copy
    of a known, already existing TextCat.T node.

3) The recursion needs to go through a method dispatch.

In concatenations, I "flattened" concatenation results that do not
exceed a length cutoff.  By "flattening", I mean copying into a single
node of type Text8.T, Text8Short.T, Text16, or Text16Short.T.  I
experimentally tuned the length cutoff to 32 bytes, for best
compromise among speed and time and in various use cases.

In concatenations, I did some heuristic rebalancing.  I used the
relative lengths of strings as a crude approximation for the relative
depths of trees.  Actual depths are not cached in the nodes, and
computing them would have been O(n) for each concatenation operation.
I postponed rebalancing flat strings into a tree, keeping them at the
top, where they are available for further flattening, until there is
no chance of this happening.

Most of the existing operations were sometimes unnecessarily
converting strings from CHAR to WIDECHAR arrays, involving
character-at-a-time conversion.  This was a likely very common case,
and I eliminated it when easily detectable.

Bugs:

I fixed (I hope!) a few bugs I discovered in the existing code.

Find[Wide]CharR had an off-by-one bug in the where the search started.

String[8|16].FindCharR was doing an address computation too early, in
a local variable declaration, before a needed NIL check, making the
check fail to work.

HasWideChars was only computing whether the representation had the
capability to hold wide characters, not whether any were actually
there.  This was not a useful meaning for the result.

TextCat.MultiCat (and NewMulti, which calls it) were not checking for
NILs.  Assuming the result was ever used, these would eventually cause
runtime errors, but not until it was more difficult to diagnose them.

Testing:

The modified code can be dynamically switched between the old and new
algorithms.  It is also loaded with instrumentation.  All of this will
slow it down, but the old/new comparisons should not have significant
bias.  TextClass.i3 has a lot of new stuff to allow clients to control
the algorithms and collect results from the instrumentation.

If people decide they like this package, I will produce a version with
all this extra stuff stripped out.

I wrote an elaborate test driver, both for bug-testing and for
experimenting and gathering performance comparisons with the old code.
It runs large numbers of randomly-generated test cases, typically
50000 flat strings, 100000 string-producing operations, heavily biased
to concatenations (substring is the only other one), and 100000 text
querying operations, roughly equally distributed.

Concatenations can be built randomly from previous strings or
"linearly", i.e., strictly left-to-right, or strictly right-to-left.
The latter two cases are symmetrical, and once the symmetry bugs were
gone, they give virtually identical performance.  In the linear
construction cases, there are no substring operations done.

The old and new algorithms can be run side-by-side on pairs of strings
that have identical abstract values (but often different internal
representations).  The results can be mechanically compared this way,
for correctness testing.

Performance summary:

In a number of different situations, the new algorithms give
improvements in total time spent in the operations, ranging from 17%
to 60%, the latter for linear concatenations, which are much slower
than random, using both the old and new algorithms.

Tree balance improves dramatically in the linear cases (the random
case is well-balanced even by the old algorithms) and recursion depth
decreases even more dramatically.

The new algorithms allocate 27% (random) to 79% (linear) more heap
memory, but a lot is garbage.  After collection, the new algorithms
retain 20% more (random) to 2% less (linear).  Total space runs
somewhat larger in the linear case, for both algorithms.  The old
algorithms toss no garbage.

In the special case of linear concatentations with all leaf strings
having length one, the new algorithms allocate over twice as much
heap storage but retain 63% less.

Rodney M. Bates