Not precompiling? about docopt.jl

[jeff-regier]

I ran it though the profiler. Looks like almost all the time is spent in inference.jl. I believe this means it's compiling the code when its first run, and that DocOpt isn't being precompiled. I'm not sure why that would be.

   803 ./inference.jl                               1583 typeinf_loop(::Core.Inference.InferenceState)    
   812 ./inference.jl                               1528 typeinf_edge(::Method, ::Any, ::SimpleVector,... 
   813 ./inference.jl                                846 abstract_call_gf_by_type(::Any, ::Any, ::Core... 
   869 ./inference.jl                               1037 abstract_call(::Any, ::Tuple{}, ::Array{Any,1... 
   921 ./inference.jl                               1067 abstract_eval_call(::Expr, ::Array{Any,1}, ::... 
  1183 ./inference.jl                               1088 abstract_eval(::Any, ::Array{Any,1}, ::Core.I... 
  1286 ./inference.jl                               1523 typeinf_edge(::Method, ::Any, ::SimpleVector,... 

[jeff-regier]

@tkelman suggests using SnoopCompile.jl to pre-compile the docopt function and the functions it calls.

[bicycle1885]

I'm sorry for the delayed reply. I will take a look next week.

[mweastwood]

I have experimented a little with this. Unfortunately I have bad news.

It seems the majority of the overhead from the first run of docopt comes from compiling a bunch of Base functions. The contribution from compiling functions in the DocOpt package itself is largely negligible (you might get a few tenths of a second by doing the precompilation). Therefore you really need to compile Julia with a userimg if you want the first call of docopt to execute quickly (I've gotten it down to ~0.3 seconds from ~2 seconds).

The routine is fairly straight forward if you follow the steps in the SnoopCompile README.

[jeff-regier]

Good to know, thanks for looking into it!