Change the astStringVerbose() recursion to extend a string instead of
returning one. This has the benefit that for tokens where the recursion
runs deep (typically large arrays), the time savings can be substantial
(see comments on benchmarks further down).
The reason is that previously, for each token, the astString of its
operands was constructed, and then appended to this tokens astString.
This led to a lot of unnecessary string copying (and with that
allocations). Instead, by passing the string by reference, the number
of temporary strings is greatly reduced.
Another way of seeing it is that previously, the string was constructed
from end to beginning, but now it is constructed from the beginning to
end. There was no notable speedup by preallocating the entire string
using string::reserve() (at least not on Linux).
To benchmark, the changes and master were tested on Linux using the
commands:
make
time cppcheck --debug --verbose $file >/dev/null
i.e., the cppcheck binary was compiled with the settings in the
Makefile. Printing the output to screen or file will of course take
longer time.
In Trac ticket #8355 which triggered this change, an example file from the
Wine repository was attached. Running the above cppcheck on master took
24 minutes and with the changes in this commmit, took 22 seconds.
Another test made was on lib/tokenlist.cpp in the cppcheck repo, which is
more "normal" file. On that file there was no measurable time difference.
A synthetic benchmark was generated to illustrate the effects on dumping
the ast for arrays of different sizes. The generate code looked as
follows:
const int array[] = {...};
with different number of elements. The results are as follows (times are
in seconds):
N master optimized
10 0.1 0.1
100 0.1 0.1
1000 2.8 0.7
2000 19 1.8
3000 53 3.8
5000 350 10
10000 3215 38
As we can see, for small arrays, there is no time difference, but for
large arrays the time savings are substantial.
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