Previously, there was a fixed grain size for all multi-functions. That was
not sufficient because some functions could benefit a lot from smaller
grain sizes.
This refactors adds a new `MultiFunction::call_auto` method which has the
same effect as just calling `MultiFunction::call` but additionally figures
out how to execute the specific multi-function efficiently. It determines
a good grain size and decides whether the mask indices should be shifted
or not.
Most multi-function evaluations benefit from this, but medium sized work
loads (1000 - 50000 elements) benefit from it the most. Especially when
expensive multi-functions (e.g. noise) is involved. This is because for
smaller work loads, threading is rarely used and for larger work loads
threading worked fine before already.
With this patch, multi-functions can specify execution hints, that allow
the caller to execute it most efficiently. These execution hints still
have to be added to more functions.
Some performance measurements of a field evaluation involving noise and
math nodes, ordered by the number of elements being evaluated:
```
1,000,000: 133 ms -> 120 ms
100,000: 30 ms -> 18 ms
10,000: 20 ms -> 2.7 ms
1,000: 4 ms -> 0.5 ms
100: 0.5 ms -> 0.4 ms
```
Previously, the function names were stored in `std::string` and were often
created dynamically (especially when the function just output a constant).
This resulted in a lot of overhead.
Now the function name is just a `const char *` that should be statically
allocated. This is good enough for the majority of cases. If a multi-function
needs a more dynamic name, it can override the `MultiFunction::debug_name`
method.
In my test file with >400,000 simple math nodes, the execution time improves from
3s to 1s.
Previously, the signature of a `MultiFunction` was always embedded into the function.
There are two issues with that. First, `MFSignature` is relatively large, because it contains
multiple strings and vectors. Secondly, constructing it can add overhead that should not
be necessary, because often the same signature can be reused.
The solution is to only keep a pointer to a signature in `MultiFunction` that is set during
construction. Child classes are responsible for making sure that the signature lives
long enough. In most cases, the signature is either embedded into the child class or
it is allocated statically (and is only created once).