...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
world.
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
Boost.Convert framework adds an additional layer of
indirection and some Boost.Convert converters are wrappers
around actual conversion facilities such as boost::lexical_cast
,
boost::spirit
, etc. Consequently, there might
be reasonable concerns with regard to the performance overhead introduced
by the framework as opposed to deploying conversion facilities directly.
To test that code has been borrowed and adapted from the Spirit.Qi performance/optimization framework (see $BOOST_ROOT/libs/spirit/workbench/qi/int_parser.cpp). The tests were
g++ -O3
test/performance_spirit.cpp -Iinclude -I../boost_1_56_0 -lrt
;
boost::lexical_cast
and boost::lexical_cast
-based converter;
boost::spirit::qi::parse
and boost::spirit::qi::parse
-based
converter.
The purpose of the test was to deploy the same functionality directly and as part of the Boost.Convert framework. Results are shown below for several consecutive runs:
gcc-4.6.3 (64-bit) raw_lxcast_str_to_int_test: 1.0504170070 [s] cnv_lxcast_str_to_int_test: 1.0610595810 [s] (1% slower than raw above) raw_spirit_str_to_int_test: 0.2845369110 [s] cnv_spirit_str_to_int_test: 0.2834834560 [s] (1% faster than raw above) raw_lxcast_str_to_int_test: 1.0770350390 [s] (2% slower than prev. run) cnv_lxcast_str_to_int_test: 1.0607665160 [s] (1% faster than raw above) raw_spirit_str_to_int_test: 0.2792295470 [s] (2% faster than prev. run) cnv_spirit_str_to_int_test: 0.2827574570 [s] (1% slower than raw above) gcc-4.8.2 (32-bit) raw_lxcast_str_to_int_test: 8.5153330600 [s] cnv_lxcast_str_to_int_test: 8.6989499850 [s] (2% slower than raw above) raw_spirit_str_to_int_test: 2.4197476510 [s] cnv_spirit_str_to_int_test: 2.4594171510 [s] (2% slower than raw above) raw_lxcast_str_to_int_test: 8.4136546980 [s] (1% faster than prev. run) cnv_lxcast_str_to_int_test: 8.5322524600 [s] (1% slower than raw above) raw_spirit_str_to_int_test: 2.3842388060 [s] (1% faster than prev. run) cnv_spirit_str_to_int_test: 2.3812094400 [s] (0% faster than raw above)
The results for consecutive runs varied with deviations of around 2%. Under 2% was also the deviation of the "cnv" code compared to the "raw" code. That indicates that the Boost.Convert framework had no detectable running overhead with the tested compilers, hardware and deployment scenarios. The results might be different on other platforms.