Quick look to PureBasic C back-end performance

PureBasic is currently using raw assembly code generation, which means the code is translated line by line to its corresponding assembly counterpart. This way to generate code has pros and cons: it’s easy to do but we loose the code context, so doing advanced optimizations (like variables to registers, loop unrolling, function inlining, code vectorization, variable removing etc.) are off the table. The only optimization PureBasic can perform is once the full assembly code is generated: a pass to detect patterns which can be optimized and replaced by more efficient one. For example:

          MOV ebx,dword [v_Gadget_ImagePool]
          INC ebx
          MOV dword [v_Gadget_ImagePool],ebx

is transformed to:

          INC    dword [v_Gadget_ImagePool]

PureBasic x86 can detect 16 different patterns and optimize them. It’s not much, but it still improves the final code quality. This kind of optimization is called peephole optimizer. It works on final code generation and can’t do much regarding high level optimization. The good point is the speed of it, the additional pass barely add any time to the compilation time. So you may ask why PureBasic can’t generated more complex optimizations ? Well, because we just don’t have the time (and let be honest, the skills) to do it our-self. It takes a lot of efforts which requires large programmer teams and academic researches.

Entering the C language, the world most used low-level language and probably the one which best optimizing compilers. PureBasic is now able to leverage the power of its optimizations, so let’s take a real world look at it. We are using the 3D example ‘MeshManualParametrics’ found in the PureBasic package. This is a mix of 3D rendering (through OGRE) and 3D calculations done in PureBasic. Here are the results:

PureBasic x64 – assembly back-end : 192 FPS

PureBasic x64 – C Back-end with optimizer enabled (-02) : 298 FPS

That’s basically a 50% increase in frame-rate just by switching the compiler. It’s really a lot. Another interesting point is the speed of the executable of C back-end without optimization (-O0) was 192 FPS as well, like PureBasic assembly back-end. Not that bad for small team compiler !