This script reports how long it takes to call an empty function 10000 times. In LSL it works as you would expect, showing that it takes about five or six seconds to make those 10000 calls. In Mono, it reports about 0.02 seconds regardless of how many calls made to the dummy function. Set i arbitrarily high and it still takes about 0.02 seconds as if the whole while loop were optimized clean out of existence. That's surprising... or suspicious.
dummy()
{
}
default
{
state_entry()
{
float t0 = llGetTime();
integer i = 10000;
while (--i >= 0) {
dummy();
}
llOwnerSay("llGetTime() delta = " + (string)(llGetTime() - t0));
}
}
Output in LSL when i = 10000: llGetTime() delta = 5.138102
Output in Mono for any value of i: llGetTime() delta = 0.022538
compared to O(1), which is an infinite speed-up. There's something about that loop that makes it appear to take constant time. On further experimentation, when I run this:
Bug
Resolved
Critical
Mono beta: Large empty loops cause sim to stall.
I've tried to tweak this a little by adding "return 1+1;" into the code and having the function return an integer. This has raised the execution time to an initial 0.177 and an average of 0.066 on resets.
I wouldn't really call this suspicious, I'd call this a major improvement - Mono is far more efficient at what it does then the original LSL VM.