"Jankifier": Codebased automatic inliner

[malware-dev]

To help with the performance issues caused by the mod profiler overhead.

Note:

• Must establish rules for what methods will be inlined, when.

[slammingprogramming]

This is an interesting idea! A code-based automatic inliner, or "Jankifier," could definitely help alleviate the performance issues that arise from mod profiler overhead, especially for scripts that run on tight performance budgets. Automatically inlining certain methods could reduce the function call overhead in critical sections of the code, which might yield a noticeable improvement in runtime efficiency.

However, as noted, establishing rules for when and where methods are inlined would be essential. Maybe we could start by setting thresholds based on method complexity or frequency of calls to decide when inlining should occur. For example, very short utility functions or commonly used getters/setters might be prime candidates, while large or rarely called methods could be skipped. This would prevent the generated code from becoming unnecessarily bulky or complex, which might actually worsen performance in some cases.

Another consideration is whether the "Jankifier" could be made to work selectively, allowing creators to specify certain methods or classes for inlining via attributes or configuration settings. That way, creators could keep control over which parts of their code are optimized and avoid unintended side effects. It might also be helpful to have a summary or report of what was inlined after each "jankification" pass, so developers can keep track of optimizations applied.

Thoughts on how this could handle recursive methods or dynamically bound calls? It could get tricky if there are functions that refer back to themselves or rely on late binding, but these are probably worth excluding in any auto-inlining rules.

[THDigi]

I think the base feature should start with a thing we mark on a method to tell it to inline all instances it can find... or even an option (opt-in) to inline all methods it can 😄

And since recursive might be a showstopper for the entire thing or add needless difficulty, I think it's not worth or even needed to do those.
If it detects recursive then it should skip it. Maybe drop a warning that it skipped it for that reason... it could even link to https://spaceengineers.wiki.gg/wiki/Modding/Reference/Mod_Profiler where I've added an example on how to turn recursive methods into a while loop.

[malware-dev]

Y'know... you could always implement this feature yourself 😁