perf: inline Buffer/Uint8Array bracket-read when statically typed (9 instr + bl → 1 instr)

[proggeramlug]

Context

Surfaced by the honest_bench profile of image_conv.ts (5×5 Gaussian on 3840×2160 RGB). Perry: 2686 ms. Zig: 270 ms. Rust: 462 ms. ~10× gap.

Profile via /usr/bin/sample on the inner blur loop shows src[idx] (where src: Buffer, idx: number int-typed) lowers to:

0x1000:  add   w1, w21, #0x2      ; compute index
0x1004:  bl    0x100019364        ; → js_buffer_get(buf, idx) : 9 instrs + 3 branches
0x1008:  scvtf d0, w0             ; i32 → f64
0x100c:  bl    0x10001edac        ; → NaN-box-double wrapper: 30+ instrs, full frame
0x1010:  fmadd d15, d14, d0, d10  ; ← the actual useful multiply-accumulate

js_buffer_get itself is:

mov  x8, x0
mov  w0, #0
cbz  x8, ret              ; null check
tbnz w1, #0x1f, ret       ; negative-index check
ldr  w9, [x8]             ; length = *buf
cmp  w1, w9
b.hs ret_zero             ; oob → 0
add  x8, x8, w1, uxtw
ldrb w0, [x8, #8]         ; the actual load
ret

Proposal

When PropertyGet's receiver is statically typed Buffer / Uint8Array and the index is an int32 expression, lower inline:

cmp   w_idx, w_len            ; len loaded from buf once, hoisted out of loop
b.hs  .oob_trap_or_undef
ldrb  w_out, [x_base, w_idx, uxtw]

…instead of bl js_buffer_get. For hot inner loops the length load is loop-invariant so it hoists once.

Expected impact

• image_conv: 208M byte-reads per blur iter × ~40 instrs/read overhead ≈ 8.3B instructions of pure wrapper code per iteration. That matches the 6.9B cycles / 44B instructions we measured total. Removing the calls should drop the loop to ~1B instructions — projected 2686 ms → 400–600 ms, i.e. parity with Rust, possibly beating it.
• Any tight Buffer loop: crypto, image processing, binary codec, hash functions — same shape.
• Secondary: unblocks LLVM's autovectorizer — with the function calls gone it'll see a clean u8 → zext i32 → mul → add reduction and emit NEON umlal/uaddl widening-multiply-accumulate. Another 2–4× on top.

Pairing

Pairs with the integer-specialization work (filed separately) — the scvtf + NaN-box-wrapper calls should also vanish when the index/accumulator locals are provably int32-stable. Either issue lands individually worthwhile; together is multiplicative.

Repro

benchmarks/honest_bench/workloads/3_image_convolution/perry/image_conv.ts + the looped variant at /tmp/perry_repros/image_conv_loop.ts in the session that filed this. Profile method: sample <pid> 8 -file prof.txt on the release binary, then otool -tV on the binary for disassembly.

[proggeramlug]

This was implemented in v0.5.38 (inline Buffer/Uint8Array bracket-access) and further optimized in v0.5.56 (i32-native index/value in Uint8ArrayGet/Set). The codegen now emits inline ldrb/strb with bounds checks instead of calling js_buffer_get/js_buffer_set. image_conv improved from 2.69s → 456ms across these versions.