This implementation, controlled by the build flag "container24s",
is similar to the single-slice container implementation, but goes
a bit further. First, instead of using a native slice as its internal
storage, it uses pointer/len/cap as distinct values, and only int32
ranges for len and cap. Second, it has a small region of additional
storage which it uses as a backing store by default for arrays or
runs. The idea is that, if you request a new empty array container,
you get one with a pre-allocated virtual slice big enough for five
values, actually stored in the Container. This is useful because
Go's allocator has size classes for 16 and 32 bytes, and the
Container comes in at 24 bytes worth of storage -- meaning that if
you allocate a container, you're allocating 32 bytes anyway, so we
might as well use that space to avoid extra allocations.
This includes some test fixups because DeepEqual was testing
too much equality in some tests.
Also, we simplify unionArrayArray to postpone creating a Container
until we're ready.
On a 64-bit machine, the slices in a Container consume 72
bytes, and the Container itself is 80. But we only use one
slice at a time! This patch shifts us to keeping a single
slice in the Container, and converting provided slices to
and from that type when we want to update it. (It is not
safe to access the slice through the wrong type.)
We also add some new tests, conditional on a build tag
called `roaringparanoia`. These tests will be optimized
away entirely by the compiler when the tag isn't
present, because the conditionals use a const. These catch
possible errors like trying to access the bitmap slice
of a non-bitmap container.
We also eliminate all direct creation of Container literals,
so we can mess with the internals more. (On reflection
and study, we decided not to go to the fancier design where
references to .n and .typ were also converted to function
calls, which would have allowed packing those attributes
more tightly, because it was a lot more overhead and a lot
of work to keep track of.)
There's some circumstances where we appear to have been
relying on incorrect guesses about the nature of containers.
For instance, in xorBitmapRun, there's logic that makes sense
only if the output's a run container, but it's not, it's a
bitmap container. This creates strange behavior sometimes,
though. Several of these are corrected now.
This commit adds some trivial stat-tracking which can be
observed at localhost:10101/debug/vars. However, writes to
a locking data structure aren't cheap, so the stat-tracking
is by default not compiled. To build it, add the build
tag `roaringstats`, which will cause the `statsHit` function
to actually do something. Otherwise, it's an empty and
inlineable function, meaning the compiler throws it away
entirely.
This would, in principle, let us get additional visibility
into edge cases and which code paths are hot. This is not
the same thing as profiling for overall performance; the
stat counts aren't affected by whether a particular code path
is using a large amount of CPU time, just reporting how
often it happens at all.