TRY/CATCH is unnecessarily slow on OS X

["Lorenz Minder" <lminder@gmx.net>]

Hi,

The PARI TRY/CATCH exception handling is currently very slow on
Mac OS X (and probably *BSD, although I haven't checked that).  I don't 
know if Linux is affected but quite possibly not.  

How slow is it?  Agonizingly slow.  The attached "except.cc" computes 
"gsqrt(2)" repeatedly, once with each call wrapped into a CATCH/TRY 
block and once without the wrapping.  With error checking, it's slower 
by an order of magnitude:

        pari_perform$ time ./except n   # No error checking.

        real    0m0.700s
        user    0m0.694s
        sys     0m0.005s
        pari_perform$ time ./except p   # W/ PARI exception handling.

        real    0m8.466s
        user    0m5.799s
        sys     0m2.660s

Some would probably argue that not every tiny call must be wrapped into
a CATCH/TRY-block, but the fact is that doing this is sometimes 
necessary, e.g., for wrapper libraries, or if you cannot or don't want
to reuse the PARI error handling mechanisms in your C program.

Why is it so slow?  The problem is that the Mac OS X version of 
setjmp/longjmp saves and restores the signal mask, which appears to take 
an insane amount of time.  Assuming that this is not necessary (if it 
is, I think you have a bug on SysV), it is better to use a variant of 
setjmp/longjmp that does not do this. Use _setjmp/_longjmp or possibly 
sigsetjmp(,0)/siglongjmp() instead.

The attached patch does this as a proof of concept, and with it applied, 
I get much better behaviour:

        pari_perform$ time ./except n

        real    0m0.700s
        user    0m0.695s
        sys     0m0.004s
        pari_perform$ time ./except p

        real    0m0.810s
        user    0m0.804s
        sys     0m0.005s

This patch breaks systems that do not have _setjmp(), so you probably 
have to test for its existence in Configure.

Best,
--Lorenz

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Attachment: except.cc
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Attachment: setjmp.patch
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