Allocations in construction of composite type with StaticArray field

General Usage Performance
1

Hello,

I’m tracking down allocations in a performance critical part of a code, where I use composite types with StaticArrays fields. I’ve noticed that initializing instances of such types triggers some allocations that I would like to eliminate (if possible).

Here is a minimal example that illustrate the issue I’m referring to.

using StaticArrays, BenchmarkTools

struct MyStaticVector{N}
    data::StaticVector{N, Int}
end

struct MyNTuple{N}
    data::NTuple{N, Int}
end

foo() = MyStaticVector(@SVector [1, 2])
bar() = MyNTuple((1, 2))

@btime foo()
@btime bar()

Running this script yields the following

$ julia alloc.jl
  9.713 ns (2 allocations: 48 bytes)
  1.452 ns (0 allocations: 0 bytes)

My understanding of statically-sized arrays is that they allow alleviating allocations altogether (do not hesitate correcting me if I’m wrong). Am I missing something?

Is there a way to rewrite foo to achieve 0 allocation? I do not know much about constructors julia, but could it be related?

Any tips will be very much appreciated. Thanks!

V.

2

StaticVector is an abstract type.
Try replacing it by the concrete type SVector in the type definition.

3 Likes
3

That did it, thanks a lot!

(Just found a related issue here.)