7 Optimization in Typed Racket

Typed Racket provides a type-driven optimizer that rewrites well-typed programs to potentially make them faster. It should in no way make your programs slower or unsafe.

For general information on Racket performance and benchmarking, see Performance.

7.1 Turning the optimizer off

Typed Racket’s optimizer is turned on by default. If you want to deactivate it (for debugging, for instance), you must add the #:no-optimize keyword when specifying the language of your program:

#lang typed/racket #:no-optimize

7.2 Getting the most out of the optimizer

Typed Racket’s optimizer can improve the performance of various common Racket idioms. However, it does a better job on some idioms than on others. By writing your programs using the right idioms, you can help the optimizer help you.

7.2.1 Numeric types

Being type-driven, the optimizer makes most of its decisions based on the types you assigned to your data. As such, you can improve the optimizer’s usefulness by writing informative types.

However, the second one uses more informative types: the Float type includes only 64-bit floating-point numbers whereas the Real type includes both exact and inexact real numbers and the Inexact-Real type includes both 32- and 64-bit floating-point numbers. Typed Racket’s optimizer can optimize the latter program to use float -specific operations whereas it cannot do anything with the former program.

Thus, to get the most of Typed Racket’s optimizer, you should use the Float type when possible. For similar reasons, you should use floating-point literals instead of exact literals when doing floating-point computations.

When mixing floating-point numbers and exact reals in arithmetic operations, the result is not necessarily a Float. For instance, the result of (* 2.0 0) is 0 which is not a Float. This can result in missed optimizations. To prevent this, when mixing floating-point numbers and exact reals, coerce exact reals to floating-point numbers using exact->inexact. This is not necessary when using + or -. When mixing floating-point numbers of different precisions, results use the highest precision possible.

On a similar note, the Float-Complex type is preferable to the Complex type for the same reason. Typed Racket can keep float complex numbers unboxed; as such, programs using complex numbers can have better performance than equivalent programs that represent complex numbers as two real numbers. As with floating-point literals, float complex literals (such as 1.0+1.0i) should be preferred over exact complex literals (such as 1+1i). Note that both parts of a literal must be present and inexact for the literal to be of type Float-Complex; 0.0+1.0i is of type Float-Complex but 0+1.0i is not. To get the most of Typed Racket’s optimizer, you should also favor rectangular coordinates over polar coordinates.

7.2.2 Lists

Typed Racket handles potentially empty lists and lists that are known to be non-empty differently: when taking the car or the cdr of a list Typed Racket knows is non-empty, it can skip the check for the empty list that is usually done when calling car and cdr.

(define: (sum (l : (Listof Integer))) : Integer

(if (null? l)

0

(+ (car l) (sum (cdr l)))))

In this example, Typed Racket knows that if we reach the else branch, l is not empty. The checks associated with car and cdr would be redundant and are eliminated.

In addition to explicitly checking for the empty list using null?, you can inform Typed Racket that a list is non-empty by using the known-length list type constructor; if your data is stored in lists of fixed length, you can use the List type constructors.

7.2.3 Vectors

In addition to known-length lists, Typed Racket supports known-length vectors through the Vector type constructor. Known-length vector access using constant indices can be optimized in a similar fashion as car and cdr.

; #(name r g b)

(define-type Color (Vector String Integer Integer Integer))

(define: x : Color (vector "red" 255 0 0))

(vector-ref x 0) ; good

(define color-name 0)

(vector-ref x color-name) ; good

(vector-ref x (* 0 10)) ; bad

In many such cases, however, structs are preferable to vectors. Typed Racket can optimize struct access in all cases.

7.2.4 Optimization coaching

The Optimization Coach package provides optimization coaching support to help you get the most of the Typed Racket optimizer. To install it, run the following command:

  raco pkg install optimization-coach

After it is installed, an "Optimization Coach" button will appear on the DrRacket toolbar for Typed Racket programs.

Similar information (albeit without in-depth explanations or advice) is available from the command line. When compiling a Typed Racket program, setting the racket logging facilities to the 'debug level and listening to the 'TR-optimizer logger causes Typed Racket to display performance debugging information. Setting the Racket logging level can be done on the command line with the -W flag:

  racket -W debug@TR-optimizer my-typed-program.rkt

7.2.5 Contract boundaries

When interoperating with untyped code (see Typed-Untyped Interaction), contracts are installed between typed and untyped modules. Contracts can have significant overhead, thus typed-untyped boundary crossings should be avoided in performance-sensitive code.

Typed Racket provides types for most of the bindings provided by #lang racket; using require/typed is unnecessary in these cases.

If you suspect that contracts at a typed-untyped boundary may be have a significant cost in your program, you can investigate further using the contract profiler.

If the contract profiler is not already installed, the following command will install it:

  raco pkg install contract-profile