Optimizing BigInt for small integers

#7

Hi Julien,
thanks for your message! I haven’t hacked the stdlib before (apart maybe from bug reports and documentation), so I welcome help in setting up a good process.

First and foremost, we can’t introduce bugs during the change. The Long/BigInteger split will introduce additional logic, and the interesting cases are when the numbers are just at the boundary.

I think the change should be introduced in a few steps:

  1. Change BigInt into an abstract class and a BigIntegerBigInt implementation class. Verify that binary compatibility is preserved, and that tests pass.

  2. Introduce a LongBigInt implementation class; still perform the computations using BigInteger, but allocate the result as a LongBigInt if it fits in a Long. Be sure that existing tests cater for the boundary cases.

  3. Migrate piece by piece the logic from Spire to avoid the detour through BigInteger.

I’m currently working with Ubuntu and Scala on the JVM. I need help setting up a minimal process that verifies that binary compatibility is preserved, and tests pass. The testing process should include parts of the community build as well after each step above, before we merge the PR in the stdlib.

In particular, I’ve never run any tests on my own computer; I’m familiar with testing with the JVM, but with Scala JS or Scala native. I may want to use test procedures with different levels of exhaustiveness to get feedback in a shorter amount of time (hacking Scala is sadly not my day-to-day job).

BTW, I’m sure of the positive performance impact this would have. Is there a standard framework to benchmark improvements in the stdlib, and where is it documented?

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#8

MiMa does this for you. I don’t know how to run it manually in sbt (I’m sure someone here or in Gitter can help you with that, or google), but Jenkins runs it as part of the build regardless.

JMH is used for benchmarking; you can find a README and code under test/benchmarks

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#9

Ok… binary compatibility will not be preserved as the constructor of BigInt is public, and BigInt will become an abstract class.

However, source compatibility should be preserved as long as user code calls the BigInt.apply factory method.

Questions:

  1. Is breaking binary compatibility a deal breaker for that optimization? There may be a way around that, by making LongBigInt a subclass of a non-abstract BigInt.

  2. If we accept to break binary compatibility, then we have to assess the amount of source compatibility breakage. How many libraries call the constructor of BigInt directly, rather than using BigInt.apply? Is the Scala community build actually rebuilding packages, or just running tests using an updated standard library?

#10

It’s a deal-breaker for 2.13 but not 2.14.

The community build rebuilds everything from source, that’s why it takes ~24 hours to run :slight_smile:

#11

I think I have identified a good way to proceed.

A. I will first clean up the current code to prepare the LongBigInt / BigIntegerBigInt split. In particular, channel direct constructor calls through BigInt.apply, optimize a few of the current methods, port some of the Spire tests. This would be done preserving binary and source compatibility. I’d PR this against 2.13 so it could be merged ASAP.

B. Perform the breaking changes with minimal changes: make BigInt abstract, introduce a final BigIntegerBigInt concrete instance with private constructor.

C. Preserving source/binary compatibility with the previous step, add the LongBigInt concrete instance, migrate code from Spire’s SafeLong.

Questions:

  1. Is there a thing as “too much test code” for BigInt? I’ll to err on the cautious side due to amount of changes this introduces.

  2. What would be the roadblocks to have this merged? Does it introduce risk for too small a benefit? Do I need to demonstrate performance benefits to have the merge approved in 2.14?

  3. I have one question about the design. At the final step, BigInt will have two implementations, one holding a Long, one holding a BigInteger. Currently, Spire’s implementation has the invariant that the BigInteger instance must not hold an integer that’s a valid Long. That enables a few additional optimizations but forces all instance creations to go through a size test, and adds a bit of mental overhead when reading the code. What do you think?

  4. After step B), the modifications would be merged against 2.14. There is no branch named 2.14 yet, right?

#12

The more tests the better :).

If the motivation for the change is performance then I think having benchmarks demonstrating the improvements is a reasonable requirement to get it merged.

I think that’s reasonable, benchmarks demonstrating these additional optimizations would be nice.

Yes, for now you can create your PR against 2.13.x, you can then retarget it to 2.14.x once that branch has been created.

#13

In Scala.js, we would eventually like to have a third subclass that would use a JavaScript bigint internally. We could do that on our own if the subclasses that you introduce not only have a private constructor, but are private themselves.

#14

Ok, I’ll get a comprehensive test suite for BigInt running first, then I’ll thinking about the next steps.

How do you usually run benchmarks on changes to the Scala library?

#15

Happy to make the subclasses private to help performance in Scala.js; that’ll be an additional argument to get this merged.

My main motivation in this: Spire has a SafeLong class that has been proven faster than BigInt or BigInteger ages ago, and I’d like to integrate these improvements in the stdlib. Then the Spire typeclasses do not need to depend on Spire concrete data types which makes Spire modular.

#16

I may start to uncover things. See https://github.com/scala/bug/issues/11792 for one possible issue, and https://github.com/scala/scala/pull/8526 for the ongoing work.

#17

Can I get feedback on the PR https://github.com/scala/scala/pull/8526 , and why it’s failing?

Earlier commits failed because I thought I had uncovered a bug, thus I added a failing test. Now all tests are passing.

#18

The scala repo requires that every commit in a PR passes the CI, this makes it easier to do bisection, partially revert a PR, and generally leads to a better commit history.

#19

Actually I found a way to preserve binary compatibility in 2.13, at the price of slightly increased memory usage.

I’m changing the BigInt class definition to


/** An arbitrary integer type; wraps `java.math.BigInteger`, with optimization for small values that can
 * be encoded in a `Long`.
 */
final class BigInt private (_bigInteger: BigInteger, _long: Long)
  extends ScalaNumber
    with ScalaNumericConversions
    with Serializable
    with Ordered[BigInt]
{
  // Class invariant: if the number fits in a Long, then _bigInteger is null and the number is stored in _long
  //                  otherwise, _bigInteger stores the number and _long = 0L

  def this(_bigInteger: BigInteger) = this(
    if (_bigInteger.bitLength <= 63) null else _bigInteger,
    if (_bigInteger.bitLength <= 63) _bigInteger.longValue else 0L
  )

Then BigInt stays final, we can have optimized logic for small values.

Compared to the subclassing proposal:

  • in the case of a long-sized BigInt, we save the price of the BigInteger instance, so the 4/8 bytes of the reference are not an issue,

  • in the case of a larger BigInt, we now store a unneeded Long field, which implies a maximal memory overhead of around 10%; that maximal overhead is computed for a BigInt that barely doesn’t fit in a Long.

I conjecture that BigInt has two major use cases in the Scala world:

  1. use as a generic integer where most of the instances fit in a Long, but BigInt is used to avoid problems related to overflow; that’s how we use BigInt (or the optimized SafeLong equivalent in Spire)

  2. use for cryptographic purposes.

In the use case 1., we’ll have a net win. In the use case 2., the overhead is likely to be small as numbers will be much larger than a Long.

I propose to optimize BigInt while preserving binary compatibility in 2.13, running it against the community build as an additional safety measure.

Then split the logic using subclasses in 2.14.

What do you think?

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#20

Modification has been submitted as a PR for discussion in

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#21

Wouldn’t it be better in forthcoming versions for BigInt to be dropped in favor of a scala.math.Numeric/Integral typeclass instance for java.math.BigInteger ? And Fractional for BigDecimal ? It would avoid wrappers.

There is a similar question about collections, at least mutable ones : IMO we should have typeclass instances for Java collections instead of reimplementing these.

#22

That’s outside of the scope of what I’m doing. The changes here should be binary compatible and mostly source compatible (source incompatibility is currently limited to the .bigInteger member changing from a val field to a def method).

#23

Is it worth spending time on this, once you start considering the refactoring I mentioned ? Wouldn’t it be better to implement your optimization as a typeclass instance for Pair[BigInteger, Long] ?

#24

Did you mean something like Either[BigInteger, Long]?

#25

I think internally it doesn’t make much difference. But yes, that’s the idea.

#26

We will be using 2.13 for years still. I appreciate any work to optimize the current standard library.

In scala 3 you can use an opaque type to wrap Either[BigInteger, Long] but users are not going to want to carry that type around as a core numeric type.

I see no win to abandoning BigInt vs making it perform as well as possible. E.g. in Spire they worked around the perf issues by making SafeLong. It would have been nice if years ago we just made BigInt the faster one.

Final note: I think it is not clear that typeclasses can be widely useful for perf optimization. The fact there are many instances often leads to megamorphic dispatch on the JVM which harms inlining. So pinning perf hopes on typeclasses seems like we need evidence this can be done. You may be motivated, but I want to encourage, not discourage the work of Denis.

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