Global workspace usage for efficiency?

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Stefan Karlsson
Stefan Karlsson 2016-1-14
回答： Stefan Karlsson 2016-1-20
Are there cases when using global variables is the most efficient implementation?
I hate using the global workspace, but I end up doing it all the time. There is only one reason that I have had for doing this: performance/efficiency.
For concrete examples, I have two heavily optimized submissions on the FEX: a Particle simulator and real time motion from video
I am well aware of how JIT acceleration works, and how Matlabs in-place operations works. The functions setappdata/getappdata seem to be good candidates for replacing the use of global workspace, however consider a situation where you modify the data in the calling function. If, as are the cases in the two FEX submissions described above, I call functions often and and share large amounts of data, isnt the global workspace more efficient than other solutions?
The answer to this question in Matlab before 2007 I would say definetly yes: the global workspace is the fast, but ugly way. I dont feel to old to learn new tricks, so please enlighten me here, and the next code i make will be free of globals.
Note that milliseconds count.

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回答（2 个）

Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson 2016-1-15
global is pretty much the slowest access; see http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/99537-which-type-of-function-call-provides-better-performance-in-matlab
However I suspect a lot of the time there is in locating the data. If you are in a mex routine you would grab the appropriate pointer and maybe data pointer as well and there would be no further cost penalty beyond copy-on-write semantics.
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Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson 2016-1-17
I think getappdata() of a unique name should be faster than global of the same name, but I would need to test to be sure.
Stefan Karlsson
Stefan Karlsson 2016-1-18
I could see how reading from data retrieved from getappdata might be faster, but I cant see how it could be faster with a combined read and write. This would force a copy of the entire data, while with the global variable no demand arises to have a local workspace version. This is the assumption I have been working with anyway...

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Stefan Karlsson
Stefan Karlsson 2016-1-20
Walters good points above are not an answer to my question. Let me try to give my point of view on this, and then anyone can feel free to rip it apart. As I said before, I want to be corrected, because I absolutely hate using the global workspace.
However, I believe there are times when using the global workspace is the most efficient. This is both in terms of efficiency of the finished app, as well as development speed and readabillity of code.
the situation occurs with callbacks, for example: GUIs and timer callbacks.
For those applications, there are only 2 ways I know of where you can be guaranteed that no extra copying of data occurrs in Matlab: nested scope variables, and global variables.
Variables created in the topmost function are reacheable to the nested functions below. This requires the entire project to be defined in a single M-file. Starting an application development with efficiency in mind, one may therefore start by making a nested functions solution, and when the size of the M-file grows, one can split up the functions into many files. When multiple files are introduced, with one function per file one need to replace the nested variables. At this point, one can use one out of several ways to make the variables reacheable. There are only two methods that are worth mentioning here, considering effeciency:
  • global variables
  • setappdata/getappdata
If the data shared this way is large, and the application will need to modify this data in multiple files, then I believe the following to be true about the global variables solution:
  • globals are the most efficient, as in requiring the smallest amount of memory
  • globals are the easiest and fastest way to implement the app
This is not an answer to suggest global variables as a good habit of development. If anything, its to point out shortcomings of the language. In Mathworks defence, it seems not a very worthwhile effort to improve this, prior to the introduction of the JIT and copy-on-write functionality. Now that this is in the language, the issues mentioned above can be bottlenecks for efficiency. As a possible future addition to the language... consider something like:
top of the first function:
define workspace myProjSpace
top of all the reliant m-files (the formerly nested functions)
using workspace myProjSpace
A hack I could make is to make a Matlab preprocessing script, that looks for "using workspace" at the top of every file, and then inserts those functions as nested versions into a file that contains "define workspace". This would probably break numerous other things in Matlab, but would work for specific use-cases in callbacks.

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