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phase3-cjson-002 (class 5+3): stack-buffer number parsing + strtod round-trip replacing sscanf. +8.85% median, 95% CI [+7.5%, +10.0%] on the C target, banked. 100% audit: byte-identical golden replay, independent ASan+UBSan clean, 10k-input differential fuzz 0 divergences, patch bounds/free-gating verified by eye. - verdict: an infrastructure sanitizer-BUILD failure (missing runtime, broken toolchain) now caps the accept at needs-human-review and logs it, instead of crashing the verdict and losing a measured bench. - results/phase3/: four public case studies (tokei class-5 wins; build flags + allocators; the comrak caught false-accept; the cJSON cross-language proof) + README. Compound-speedup claim stated as an approximation, not a measured figure (CIs don't multiply). - .gitignore: cjson build-artifact dirs. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
65 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
65 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
# Case study 1 — tokei: compounding algorithmic wins (Rust, class 5)
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**Target:** [tokei](https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei) v14.0.0 — a
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source-code line counter. **Workload:** 221 MB / 4360 files (8 replicas
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of the Pro Git book + comrak's own tree), single rayon thread, CPU
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pinned. **Result:** three independent, CI-verified class-5 wins on the
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same hot function — each proposed *by the unattended agent* and
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100%-audited. Multiplied together they are **~1.26× over the Phase-0
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baseline** (1.107 × 1.037 × 1.099), but that product is an
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approximation, not a measured figure: each speedup carries its own
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bootstrap CI against its own baseline, and confidence intervals do not
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compose through multiplication. The trustworthy claims are the three
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individual increments below.
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## The hot path
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tokei spends the overwhelming majority of its instructions in one
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function — `LanguageType::parse_lines` and the per-byte loop inside
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`SyntaxCounter::perform_multi_line_analysis`. The cache-sim profile put
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it at **55.9% of instructions, 62% of all branches, 44% of branch
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mispredicts** on the pinned corpus: for every byte of every line, the
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counter tested a stack of quote/comment token matchers.
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## The three wins
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| run | mechanism | speedup (median) | 95% CI |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| `phase0-tokei-002` (class 3) | read path: `fs::read` pre-sized, BOM-only decode | 1.099 | [1.080, 1.127] |
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| `phase2-tokei-001` (class 5) | 256-entry first-byte gate table for the token matchers | 1.107 | [1.084, 1.131] |
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| `phase2-tokei-003` (class 5) | forward-only whitespace break (drop the `rposition` rescan) | 1.037 | [1.027, 1.052] |
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| `phase2-tokei-008` (class 5) | streaming leftmost `important_syntax` scan (one vectorized pass, not per-line restart) | 1.099 | [1.073, 1.112] |
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Each is a **redundant-work elimination**: the first-byte gate replaces
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five per-byte matcher loops with one table load; the whitespace-break
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change drops a full backward scan of the file tail per byte; the
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streaming scan replaces a per-line aho-corasick restart (which kept
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memmem's SIMD prefilter in its short-haystack slow path) with a single
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leftmost search advanced by integer comparisons.
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## Why the numbers are trustworthy
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- **Byte-identical golden replay** on the pinned corpus for every win —
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a code counter that miscounts one line fails the gate.
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- **10,000-input differential fuzz** (`scripts/diff-fuzz-tokei.py`),
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pristine vs candidate, **0 divergences** — after canonicalizing
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tokei's benign parallel-walker output ordering (a real finding:
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raw-byte differential comparison over-counts when the target is
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legitimately nondeterministic in presentation).
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- **ASan/LSan clean** on the patched tree over the full corpus.
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- **Interleaved A/B** vs a pristine-rebuilt baseline, bootstrap 95% CI
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lower bound ≥ the 2% bar. `phase2-tokei-008` was the first accept
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through the *machine-enforced* sanitizer gate (see case study 3).
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## What it demonstrates
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The richest wins on a mature Rust binary were not exotic — they were
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"this loop does work it doesn't need to, on every byte." The agent found
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each by reading the cache-sim profile, checking the ledger to avoid
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re-attempting a class on the same hotspot, and proposing the cheapest
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untried mechanism. Three separate hypotheses, three separate verified
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increments, all on the same 40%-of-runtime function — and one honest
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rejection in between (`phase2-tokei-009`, a real +5.7% median whose
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noisy CI lower bound of +0.2% could not clear the bar, so it does not
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count).
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