From: Frédéric Gava <gava@univ-paris12.fr>

> Sorry for the inconvenience and this stupid error: I am a very bad C 
> programmer.
> 
> But, I do not obtain the performance of Jacques Garrigue :-( I try to 
> bench a parallel matrix multiplication algorithm and test the difference 
> between C+MPI and OCaml+MPI (I try to prove that OCaml is efficient 
> enought for high-performance, in this community, they largely prefer 
> Fortran or C...))
> 
> 
> a) with a "polymorphic" C program (using 
> "multiply_complex_generic(i,complexe_add,complexe_mult,a,b,c);")
> 
> time ./cmult 600 2 602 1
> real    0m18.402s
> user    0m17.333s
> sys     0m0.044s
> 
> b) for a monomorphic C programs (using "multiply_complex(i,a,b,c);");
> 
> time ./cmult 600 2 602 1
> real    0m5.604s
> user    0m5.556s
> sys     0m0.036s

Interesting. It all depends on the compiler.
With gcc 3.4, as provided in FreeBSD, I get almost no difference
between your polymorphic and monomorphic versions. But if I switch to
gcc 4.1, the monomorphic version is indeed much faster. Actually, what
I get is:
gcc 3.4 polymorphic: 15s
gcc 4.1 polymorphic: 20s
gcc 3.4 monomorphic: 15s
gcc 4.1 monomorphic:  7s
So it looks like gcc 4.1 is better for monomorphic code, but worse for
function calls...
Note that in my case, this is still within a factor 2 of ocaml (which
is about the same as gcc 3.4).
But your C compiler may be doing some other platform specific
optimizations. The only way to know what is happening is to look at the
generated assembler.

Jacques Garrigue