Replace refs in pprint

Question

I noticed that pprint uses refs and dosync transactions in a number of places, which seems unlikely to be necessary. It seems like these could be replaced by atoms, or even volatiles, given that printing typically happens in a single thread. Presumably this would improve performance of pprint significantly.

Answer 1

_Comment made by: killme2008_

I develop a patch to fix this issue.I run all the tests in clojure and clojure.data.json, and no one fails.

Use criterium to do a simple benchmark as below:


(use 'criterium.core)
(require '[clojure.data.json :as json])
(bench (json/write-str
  {:a 1 :b 2 :c (range 10) :d "hello world"
   :e (apply hash-set (range 10))}))


before patch:


Evaluation count : 6180060 in 60 samples of 103001 calls.
             Execution time mean : 10.302604 µs
    Execution time std-deviation : 597.958933 ns
   Execution time lower quantile : 9.631444 µs ( 2.5%)
   Execution time upper quantile : 11.618551 µs (97.5%)
                   Overhead used : 1.724553 ns


After patch:


Evaluation count : 6000900 in 60 samples of 100015 calls.
             Execution time mean : 10.212543 µs
    Execution time std-deviation : 564.874941 ns
   Execution time lower quantile : 9.528383 µs ( 2.5%)
   Execution time upper quantile : 11.334033 µs (97.5%)
                   Overhead used : 1.827143 ns

Answer 2

Reference: https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/CLJ-1799 (reported by alexmiller)