Performance/WhatToTest

Revision as of 01:00, 6 May 2008

What things need to be tested as part of this benchmark?

Fundamental Concepts

Most of these can't easily be tested.

• regular types
• basic math
• basic flow control
• dereference (pointer/iterator is a regular type that can be dereferenced)
• type conversion
  • performance of type conversions (known to be a problem on certain compilers)

Language Concepts

• abstraction
• inheritance
• function calls
• exceptions
• rtti
• function objects
• template instantiation
• constructors
  • Are empty constructors correctly optimized away?

Simple Idioms

These are building blocks, with more than one way to express them. These are also usually found in headers like "inlines.h", "math_utils.h", etc.

• swap
• absolute value
• min/max
• switch versus if/else trees
• pin values to range (max, min combo)
• rotate bits
• byte order reversal
• round up/down
• round float to int
• thresholding
• pointer alignment tests and comparisons

Complex Idioms

Runtime Support

• allocation / deletion
  • new, delete
  • malloc, free

• mathlib

• string manipulation routines
  • strcpy, strchr, strcat, etc.

• memory routines
  • memcpy, memmove, memset, memcmp, etc.

More Complex Stuff

• STL containers
• iostreams

Optimizations

Need to test as many as possible. And this list deserves it's own page.

Conformance to Specification

• user specified swap in STL algorithms
• short circuit evaluation of boolean expressions

Other?