points by zahlman 1 day ago | 0 comments
Probably "bound by the data model" is a better way to put it. The interpreter might not be required to touch the data structure, but you have to do a lot of touching of the data structure to get the work done (plus, its mere existence ruins any dream of cache coherency).
Can you not mostly cache whether anything weird needs to happen and do the direct access with minimal overhead?
You said elsewhere "But that doesn't help much if/when you're doing two hash lookups per iteration just to find two small integers to add together." but looking up two fields isn't inherently a very big overhead. And you can cache the actual hash, and if you want to you can make sure the fields on similar objects have a consistent offset and cache that offset to make it even faster. This code using lots of objects is presumably not the core number crunching on arrays; we're doing more logic per access and we can handle a few instructions to get a value.