Does static go faster?
Daniel gave a talk about the performance impact of vars in 2014: Daniel Solano Gomez - How Clojure Works: Understanding the Clojure Runtime.
Clojure 1.8+ has the :direct-linking feature (added in 2016). See compiler-options.
I couldn’t find a quantification of the performance impact turning on :direct-linking has.
It strikes me as odd that this wouldn’t be a much more commonly discussed and documented deployment option.
Does anyone have any benchmarks or anecdotes about this?
GraalVM compile times claims a very significant performance boost.
I’ve tried to create a very simple benchmark project to observe the performance effect, but no effect is observed. Am I doing it wrong?
For convenience, a Makefile is provided that will time the examples
$ maketime clj -M:hello-dynamic
Hello world
0.81 real 1.46 user 0.16 sys
time clj -M:hello-static
Hello world
0.78 real 1.43 user 0.16 sys
time clj -M:hello-compile
direct.hello
0.80 real 1.45 user 0.16 sys
time java -cp `clj -Spath` direct.hello
Hello world
real 0m0.797s
user 0m1.439s
sys 0m0.162s
time clj -M:primes-dynamic
Found 17984 primes
5.53 real 6.31 user 0.36 sys
time clj -M:primes-static
Found 17984 primes
5.62 real 6.22 user 0.37 sys
time clj -M:primes-compile
direct.primes
0.85 real 1.40 user 0.17 sys
time java -cp `clj -Spath` direct.primes
Found 17984 primes
real 0m5.922s
user 0m6.771s
sys 0m0.416sFor my experiment, :direct-linking makes no improvement at all.