Performance luabind vs. SWIG

Hello list,

Since I did not find any speed comparisons on bindings to Lua I decided 
to run a little test for a simple class implementation using SWIG and 
luabind.

Here is the class:

namespace tmmod
{
	class TMMatrix;

// 	#ifndef SWIG

	class TMMatrix{
		public:
			TMMatrix(int i, int j) {}
			TMMatrix operator+(const TMMatrix & rhs)const{}
			void func1(int i){}
			void func2(int i){}
			void func3(int i){}
			void func4(int i){}
			void func5(int i){}
			void func6(int i){}
			void func7(int i){}

	};


	#ifndef SWIG
	void open_lib_TM(lua_State *myLuaState);
	#endif

	void external_matrix_method(TMMatrix & mat);

}

and here the luabind code:

	void open_lib_TM(lua_State *myLuaState)
	{
		luabind::module(myLuaState, "luabind") 		[
			luabind::class_<TMMatrix>("TMMatrix")
				.def(luabind::constructor<int,int>())
				.def("func1",&TMMatrix::func1)
				.def("func2",&TMMatrix::func2)
				.def("func3",&TMMatrix::func3)
				.def("func4",&TMMatrix::func4)
				.def("func5",&TMMatrix::func5)
				.def("func6",&TMMatrix::func6)
				.def("func7",&TMMatrix::func7)
				.def(luabind::self + luabind::other<TMMatrix>())
		];


	}

The wrapper code for SWIG is simply "%include matrix.hpp"

The functions do not anything - I only wanted to know the speed of the 
binding: So I ran through the following example:

n = 1e6

print("time at start: " .. TNG.Time())

mat2 = luabind.TMMatrix(3,3)
for i=1,n do
        matrix = luabind.TMMatrix(3,3)
        mat2 = matrix+luabind.TMMatrix(3,3)
        mat2 = matrix+luabind.TMMatrix(3,3)
        mat2:func1(1)
        mat2:func3(1)
        mat2:func7(1)
end

print("time after luabind: " .. TNG.Time())

mat2 = tm.TMMatrix(3,3)
for i=1,n do
        matrix = tm.TMMatrix(3,3)
        mat2 = matrix+tm.TMMatrix(3,3)
        mat2 = matrix+tm.TMMatrix(3,3)
        mat2:func1(1)
        mat2:func3(1)
        mat2:func7(1)
end

print("time after SWIG: " .. TNG.Time())


and got:

luabind: 9.4 sec
swig:    4.78 sec

This is quite astonishing since I thought that template magic may be 
able to speed up things. I did not use any special -D's, luabind was 
used as provided by my vendor (opensuse x64).

I only wanted the list you know this. Maybe someone picks it up to 
finde some room for improvement in luabind.

Sebastian






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