[epsilon-dev] IPropertyGetters/Setters in Models

[Sina Madani <sinadoom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

 

I noticed that the getPropertyGetter and getPropertySetter implementations in a lot of models (including PlainXml and Emf) return a new instance every time. Since property accesses are frequent (could be tens of millions of times per program), this results in a lot of unnecessary objects being created and GC’d. I was wondering if this is a bug in the implementation (perhaps a programming mistake), or part of the design? Since judging by the implementations of the getters/setters, there isn’t any state stored – these are effectively pure functions. If so I propose to cache all property getters and setters, which should in theory drastically reduce memory allocations. Intuitively it seems like a costly oversight in the design (in terms of performance) if this is the case, so please let me know if I’m missing something.

 

Thanks,

Sina