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How Expensive Is a Go Function Call?

billglover.me · 2,641 words · saved by 1 readers

I was recently benchmarking various implementations of an algorithm and noticed that the recursive implementation of an algorithm performed worse than its inline equivalent. I didn’t know if it made sense to attribute this overhead to the cost of the additional function calls in the recursive implementation. I set out to see if I could see behind the scenes of a Go function call and determine just how expensive each function call is. TLDR: The cost of a function call? I still don’t know. The best I can offer is that it depends, well that and an exploration of Go assembler. In this post, I take you through the analysis I did and highlight what I learned along the way. Rather than use a complex algorithm, I sought to use the simplest possible program that demonstrated the behaviour I wanted to investigate. This Go program takes an int, in this case 1000, and increments it by 1 inside a loop that executes 1000 iterations. The result, 2000, is printed to the screen. I included the loop to

I was recently benchmarking various implementations of an algorithm and noticed that the recursive implementation of an algorithm performed worse than its inline equivalent. I didn't know if it made sense to attribute this overhead to the cost of the additional function calls in the recursive implementation. I set out to see if I could see behind the scenes of a Go function call and determine just how expensive each function call is. TLDR: The cost of a function call? I still don't know. The best I can offer is that it depends, well that and an exploration of Go assembler. In this post, I take

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