As Verilator continuously allocates and releases small objects (e.g.:
AstNode, V3GraphVertex, V3GraphEdge), it spends a significant amount of
time in malloc/free and friends. This patch adds the --enable-tcmalloc
configure option to link Verilator against the high performance malloc
implementation library libtcmalloc. The default is to use libtcmalloc if
available on the system. Note that there are no source code change, we
are simply replacing the standard library memory allocation functions.
Measured major compilation speed improvement of 27% when running
Verilator with -O3 on a large design.
Wilson Snyder
Harald Heckmann
Geza Lore
David Stanford
Kuba Ober