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5.12.5 Trace Files and Disassembly

In order to write efficient code, you need to know the relative costs of different operations. The main reason why writing efficient Common Lisp code is difficult is that there are so many operations, and the costs of these operations vary in obscure context-dependent ways. Although efficiency notes point out some problem areas, the only way to ensure generation of the best code is to look at the assembly code output.

The disassemble function is a convenient way to get the assembly code for a function, but it can be very difficult to interpret, since the correspondence with the original source code is weak. A better (but more awkward) option is to use the :trace-file argument to compile-file to generate a trace file.

A trace file is a dump of the compiler’s internal representations, including annotated assembly code. Each component in the program gets four pages in the trace file (separated by “^L”):

• The implicit-continuation (or IR1) representation of the optimized source. This is a dump of the flow graph representation used for “source level” optimizations. As you will quickly notice, it is not really very close to the source. This representation is not very useful to even sophisticated users.
• The Virtual Machine (VM, or IR2) representation of the program. This dump represents the generated code as sequences of “Virtual OPerations” (VOPs.) This representation is intermediate between the source and the assembly code—each VOP corresponds fairly directly to some primitive function or construct, but a given VOP also has a fairly predictable instruction sequence. An operation (such as +) may have multiple implementations with different cost and applicability. The choice of a particular VOP such as +/fixnum or +/single-float represents this choice of implementation. Once you are familiar with it, the VM representation is probably the most useful for determining what implementation has been used.
• An assembly listing, annotated with the VOP responsible for generating the instructions. This listing is useful for figuring out what a VOP does and how it is implemented in a particular context, but its large size makes it more difficult to read.
• A disassembly of the generated code, which has all pseudo-operations expanded out, but is not annotated with VOPs.

Note that trace file generation takes much space and time, since the trace file is tens of times larger than the source file. To avoid huge confusing trace files and much wasted time, it is best to separate the critical program portion into its own file and then generate the trace file from this small file.