by: Yann Le Du aka ianxek

Abstract

SaC, an array oriented functional programming language, surprisingly crushes gcc/clang on a
simpletonish Fibonacci-like µbenchmark. We thus investigate the reasons for that, and it turns out
that side-effects and term rewriting play a large role there. Read the full blog entry if you want me
to tell you more…

I discovered the SaC programming language on january 20th 2022. I had a shock. Coming from Matlab, Julia, Python and C/C++ I had never heard of SaC, yet it has all the features I want for my needs in scientific computations, and good expressivity, especially with its with loop. It has both an industrial look, together with the FP smoothness, you know, this academic texture. So it’s built by academics for engineering purposes. But SaC is quasi-absent from the web outside of its academic den. I saw a reference somewhere from 2011 stating SaC was “state of the art”... but a state of the art that has had no echo since.

I thus had the idea of a series of posts around SaC benchmarks, and will write them with the help of Sven-Bodo Scholz (hereafter SBS), who is SaC's designer and one of the main contributors : he helps me figure out what SaC is doing (also what I’m doing) and I write about what I do and what I think about all that. Then SBS can say what he thinks about my interpretation. So it is a very open-minded series, where an end-user with no serious CS background, like me, is exploring the possibilities offered by SaC compared to other languages. So I’ll just say what I think about all that, and everything I say about SaC is checked by SBS, so he might (not) agree with the rest (you’ll have to guess !) and of course many other will definitely not agree, and that’s what makes the whole series interesting too : have people discover SaC, see it’s wondrous and surprisingly unknown power, and start using it, and have others teach me where I’m wrong and why they chose not to use SaC because of course they have thought deeply about that.

This series is a screenshot of my current reflection, i.e. a thoughtshot, which of course can evolve as other people enlighten me. It is thus an informed (thanks to SBS) yet biassed (thanks to me) series. I like to state clearly what I think so that others can easily concur with me or debunk me, I’m not trying to be nice, nor actually trying to be mean.

What’s my goal in this post ?

In this first post on the SaC language for hardcore neuron-bulging no BS scientists (aka physicists), I will present a very simple code with surprising results. Everyone knows the Fibonacci sequence, and many use it as a µbenchmark when they look at a new language they want to explore. Now in order to compare SaC with gcc/clang I wrote a modified Fibonacci that tries to lengthen the computation by making apparent modifications which in fact are not modifications in the end : they’re meant to slow things down but not change anything to the final result. We thus test the capacity of the compiler to help humans deal with what they're not really good at, i.e. repetitive and automatic tasks. So I don’t want a compiler to just translate the code to another language, I want it also to work for me and elide my stupidity wherever possible -- and thus save CO2 too (I will also address that, and the solution to Goldbach conjecture, in a later post).

About µbenchmarks

In general, people have a love & hate relationship with µbenchmarks : they like it as long as they're favorable to their beloved language, and when it is not the case they find all kinds of excuses like "Oh, µbenchmarks are not interesting because they don't generalize to the situation encountered with more complex code where the timing depends on tons of other factors." Yes indeed, sometimes, but

0. We don't denigrate 100m sprinters because their performance doesn’t generalize to a marathon.

1. In a complex code, there might be gullets which perfectly fit the µbenchmark situation.
2. We don't always write complex applications : statistically, most are short, just look at the statistics of github which itself over-represents longer bigger codebases because who wants to push simple stuff and exhibit that to the public eye ?
3. I'm a reductionist, and I believe that global performance is achieved by local performance, and I wouldn't trust someone telling me that “yes, this pillar is indeed weak, but once there will be a bunch packed together with a roof over your head it'll be fine, because then pillars don’t matter anymore, I can assure you, trust me”. Nope.

It is also true that my code would be easy to correct by an average coder, but that's the point : why doesn't the compiler see what is obvious ? If a compiler cannot help me solve trivial problems, how can I expect it to help me solve anything complex ?

If a computer miscalculates the sum of the first n integers, and someone answers "well, it's not interesting because the result is n(n+1)/2 then I totally disagree. It is indeed in those rare occasions where a human knows the result that it is interesting to see how a computer finds his way through the (trivial) maze.

For more on µbenchmarks, you're better off reading from the masters directly, like Daniel Lemire, who's got a very solid approach to the field even though he's not a physicist (see definition above), at least officially.

SaC's opinionated approach to scientific computing

Now with regards to time spent coding, should the coder spend time optimizing everything ? If so, what path is he to take among all possibilities ? And what about safety ? And should he optimize the worse case, the best case, or the mean, or… Here, SBS tells us SaC's philosophy is :

SaC is built on the idea that the programmer should have as little control over the HW choices as possible making programs better portable to different / new architectures.

SaC thus is closer to what scientists typically want to do with a language, i.e. focus on the maths and let the language deal with the rest. But then scientists (I mean physicists, applied maths, etc.) accept to abandon every possible control to the compiler. This is exactly what I have experienced with Matlab, Mathematica, and many others. The difference with SaC is that it offers some kind of formal optimization possibilities (term rewriting) in the world of numerics, and allows one to escape the appalling slowness of standard mathematical platforms while allowing a new approach to expressivity, something we'll see in later posts... Ok, ok, here’s an appetiser : SaC has recently topped it’s standard powerful syntax with some new sugar for tensor operations tailored to the use of physicists et al. like me.

SaC doesn't just compile locally : it needs to see the whole code, with all the imports, in order to perform maximally. This means that the imports are in fact includes ! And this also explains why, with the default flags, the compiler seems darn slow. I mean, real slow, like Rust slow, yes, sorry. But contrary to Julia, it doesn't preload the BLAS library before running your hello world just in case you might also want to find the eigenvalues of a hamiltonian while saluting. Yes I know, Julia is not meant to be performant, it’s meant to be user-friendly first, performant second. But still, that’s why I went to Julia before, for its Matlab on juice looks. Right, also for its enticing powerful macro system that allows new cool syntax which in the hands of abled craftsmen yields amazing libraries. Yes, I like sidetracking. We'll come back to that SaC overhead later in the post. And we’ll also pit SaCzilla against Julia in later posts, I know you want to see that ! What a bunch of decadent romans you make…

SaC, gcc, term rewriting and loop lifting

I originally took the idea of Fibonacci for SaC when going over an interesting blog post on K/Q, which is also a bit funny because the author says the k/Q code has a problem with overflow, implying the C does not, while evidently the C code has it too since it’s computing the 100_000_000th Fibonacci number which has approximately 20_000_000 digits ! I guess he didn't notice because the C output is positive while the K/Q output is negative... To compute that Fibonacci number, it would require a type int with about 70 million bits or 10MB ! I told you I liked sidetracking.

So, back to the code, I choose to always compute some stuff I add modulo 2, which of course ensures I can't overflow, and played a little trick so that the inner loop was not evidently independent of the outer loop. It's a very stupid trick, but that code is not meant to test me, but rather the compiler and how he can find his way out of the bit bag.

Initially, I wanted to give SaC some time to really show it's strength, because as you'll see SaC has an overhead compared to straight C. But then I noticed that something strange happened… the more I gave SaC space, the tinier gcc looked. It’s a bit like in ATS, the more verbose you are, the more powerful spells you can invoke, which just blows away all contenders. Why always refer to ATS ? Because I really like ATS too, and because I feel SaC could live with ATS, and because this post is not a peer-reviewed publication and I can talk about what I want.

Here's the C code on the right compared to the SaC one. The first aspect that stands out -- apart from the fact that I code in Vim and you should too -- is the very high resemblance between both codes : SaC is much better used without specifying the types as we do in C, but since the compiler supposes that integer literals are i32 we help it by adding a type suffix to those literals.

We'll address the quirks of the SaC language in a later post, specifically the peculiarities of the language that a coder needs to be aware of especially if the latter comes from C, because SaC, in spite of it's claimed (Single Assignment C) and actual resemblance to C, is very different under the hood and that can lead to come quiproquo. Let's go back to the µbenchmark.

Results and analysis

So what are the numbers ? Well, SaC gives the correct output of 2 : Compiled with sac2c -v2 because -v2 tells you what the compiler is doing, but not with all the gory details :

real    0m0.545s
user    0m0.026s
sys    0m0.032s

gcc/clang also finds 2 (that's a good start) but :

Compiled with `gcc -O3`
real    0m18.381s
user    0m17.832s
sys    0m0.066s

Wow ! gcc made something that is 600 times slower than SaC ! And that's both an exciting and painful scene... gcc fails miserably on trivial code.

Yes, yes, I know, this depends on the reps mainly, but I wanted to show how it actually matters. How so ? Well, imagine many little snippets of code like that positioned at different places, with no obvious link but performing the same kind of computation for a smaller number of reps each, with a total reps similar to mine here, then it will also slow down the global time, while being very difficult to pinpoint using a performance analysis tool : you might have a few places that take p seconds, then many places taking q<<p seconds, and yet those reps*q seconds add up to much more than a few p ! If each of those little loops or similar are optimized away automatically, then so much so for the time spent manually optimising the code.

It is not trendy nowadays to delegate the compilation to gcc, the cool kids on the block use llvm. And on my mac I actually use llvm, because gcc is an alias for clang which itself is the C frontend for llvm. But why ? I mean why not also work on the compiler itself, the one that spews out the machine code ? Why only focus on talking to LLVM ? I guess it’s a first step, but I also know that LLVM forbids language designers to tailor the optimisations to their language, that’s why many designers relying on LLVM dream of another backend for their creation.

If you have the resources to optimise your code manually, folding your code over Bakhvalov's book, then you might reach the same performance. But then you'll need to do that for each program you write. So SaC is meant to delegate that performance tuning to the compiler, namely sac2c. This is why SaC has been working on the compiler for 30 years, and why you need very competent postdocs to change any feature, because everything holds on everything else and one needs to make sure that small local perturbations will not crack the whole edifice. It's like any code really, imagine changing a single letter randomly in a codebase, that will probably make it useless.

Code entropic resistance (CER)

That’s actually something that would be interesting, pull a sample of 1000 codebases on github, compile, run the tests, and then change n>0 non whitespace character randomly in a single file of the codebase and see how it compiles and runs the tests, then output a entropic fragility measure as a function of n, like CER(2) = [10,68] which would mean that for n=2 the compilation fails 10% of the time while the execution fails 68% of the time.

SBS told me that idea exists and is called fuzzing, I will look into that in later posts, here or on my nascent blog, as I will deem appropriate (I like “deem”, it sounds like I’m an authority).

SaCzilla’s DNA

So how does SaC manage such flabbergasting performance gains compared to state of the art imperative language compiler like gcc ?

• Is FP there ?
• Side-effects ?
• Term rewriting ?
• If 3., does it benefit from FP ?
• Why is a state of the art compiler for imperative language as STANDARD as C incapable of not looking like it’s not even trying ?

So the inner loop is :

for (i = 0; i < N; i++ ) {
    next = first + second%2ll + rep;
    first = second;
    second = next - rep;
}

And SBS explains :

the compiler figures out that second = second%2ll This is achieved by leveraging algebraic rules such as associative law, a+0 = a and x - x = 0. Once the compiler finds that, the inner loop becomes invariant to the outer one.

So there is powerful use of term rewriting, something I personally discovered for the first time (outside dedicated math platforms of course) in the Pure programming language.

SBS adds :

Now FP is hitting and the compiler lifts that loop out of the outer et voilà!

Isn’t it nice to see when French is cool to substitute for English ? Eh oui, je suis français.

It turns out that SaC allows us to see the optimised code, in a dialect of SaC that is actually valid SaC ! Use sac2c -bopt

Let's see the gist of it.

Line 506 is the fibonacci function in the SaC dialect :

/****************************************************************************
 * _MAIN::fibonacci(...) [ body ]
 ****************************************************************************/
longlong _MAIN::fibonacci( longlong f { ,NN } , longlong s { ,NN } , longlong rep { ,NN } , int N { ,NN } )
/*
 *  fibonacci ::  ---
 */
{
  bool _pinl_136__flat_210 { , NN } ;
  longlong first__SSA0_1 { , NN } ;
 
  _pinl_136__flat_210 = _gt_SxS_( rep, 0LL);
  first__SSA0_1 = _MAIN::fibonacci__Cond_3( f, _pinl_136__flat_210, N, rep, s, f) ;
  return( first__SSA0_1);
}

Here we see the fibonacci function, the optimised version : the compiler, apart from term rewriting, turned the loops into functions, something which another language, namely ATS encourages to do right in the code itself :

In imperative programming, a function like testfact is normally implemented in terms of a for-loop (instead of being defined recursively). While there is indeed direct support for for-loops and while-loops in ATS, I will not attempt to make use of the support in this book. I hope to make a convincing argument that making extensive use of recursion is a key to increasing one's programming producivity. In fact, I think that a functional programmer should develop a reflex for solving problems recursively.

and which we also see in one of the recommended implementations of the strict Fibonacci in SaC.

So the optimised fibonacci actually kept all the variables' names we used. Now that functions declares stuff, checks that rep is greater than 0 with _gt_SxS_ and then passes that check to the function fibonacci__Cond_3. So in effect, fibonacci is just the fibonacci__Cond_3. Let's see what this one does.

/****************************************************************************
 * Cond function:
 * _MAIN::fibonacci__Cond_3(...) [ body ]
/****************************************************************************/
longlong _MAIN::fibonacci__Cond_3( longlong first { ,NN } , bool _flat_0 { ,NN } , int N { ,NN } , longlong rep { ,NN } , longlong s { ,NN } , longlong f { ,NN } )
/*
 *  fibonacci__Cond_3 ::  ---
 */
{
  longlong _dlirmov_2401__pinl_137__flat_60 { , NN } ;
  longlong _dlirmov_2400__pinl_137__flat_60 { , NN } ;
  longlong _dlirmov_2397_rep { , NN } ;
  bool _dlirmov_2388__pinl_138__flat_196 { , NN } ;
  int{0} _dlirmov_2385_i { , NN } ;
  longlong _dlirmov_2382__pinl_137__flat_60 { , NN } ;
  bool _dlirmov_2381__pinl_138__flat_196 { , NN } ;
  int _dlirmov_2380__esd_173 { , NN } ;
  int{0} _dlirmov_2379_i { , NN } ;
  longlong first__SSA0_2 { , NN } ;
  longlong first__SSA0_1 { , NN } ;
 
  if (_flat_0)
  {
    _dlirmov_2379_i = 0;
    _dlirmov_2380__esd_173 = _neg_S_( N);
    _dlirmov_2381__pinl_138__flat_196 = _lt_SxS_( _dlirmov_2380__esd_173, 0);
    _dlirmov_2397_rep, _dlirmov_2388__pinl_138__flat_196, _dlirmov_2385_i, _dlirmov_2401__pinl_137__flat_60 = _MAIN::_dup_74_fibonacci__Loop_2( _dlirmov_2381__pinl_138__flat_196, _dlirmov_2379_i, rep, s) ;
    _dlirmov_2382__pinl_137__flat_60 = _add_SxS_( _dlirmov_2397_rep, s);
    first__SSA0_1 = _MAIN::_dup_2393_fibonacci__Cond_1( f, _dlirmov_2382__pinl_137__flat_60, _dlirmov_2385_i, _dlirmov_2388__pinl_138__flat_196, N) ;
  }
  else
  {
  }
  first__SSA0_2 = ( _flat_0 ? first__SSA0_1 : first );
  return( first__SSA0_2);
}

First, we see the check passed as _flat_0, then that one also declares a bunch of stuff, then if the check is ok, it calls two functions, _dup_74_fibonacci__Loop_2 and _dup_2393_fibonacci__Cond_1. In between it adds rep to s in variable number 2382 and passes that to the second function as the second argument. Let's see the first function first.

/****************************************************************************
 * Loop function with Loop Count -1:
 * _MAIN::_dup_74_fibonacci__Loop_2(...) [ body ]
 ****************************************************************************/
longlong, bool, int{0}, longlong _MAIN::_dup_74_fibonacci__Loop_2( bool _pinl_138__flat_196 { ,NN } , int{0} i { ,NN } , longlong rep { ,NN } , longlong s { ,NN } )
/*
 *  _dup_74_fibonacci__Loop_2 ::  ---
 */
{
  longlong _dlirmov_2399_rep { , NN } ;
  longlong _dlirmov_2398_rep { , NN } ;
  bool _dlirmov_2390__pinl_138__flat_196 { , NN } ;
  bool _dlirmov_2389__pinl_138__flat_196 { , NN } ;
  int{0} _dlirmov_2387_i { , NN } ;
  int{0} _dlirmov_2386_i { , NN } ;
  longlong _dlirmov_2384__pinl_137__flat_60 { , NN } ;
  longlong _dlirmov_2383__pinl_137__flat_60 { , NN } ;
  longlong _pinl_137__flat_60 { , NN } ;
  longlong _pinl_147__flat_152 { , NN } ;
  bool _pinl_148__flat_210 { , NN } ;
 
  _pinl_137__flat_60 = _add_SxS_( rep, s);
  _pinl_147__flat_152 = _add_SxS_( -1LL, rep);
  _pinl_148__flat_210 = _gt_SxS_( _pinl_147__flat_152, 0LL);
  if (_pinl_148__flat_210)
  {
    _dlirmov_2398_rep, _dlirmov_2389__pinl_138__flat_196, _dlirmov_2386_i, _dlirmov_2383__pinl_137__flat_60 = _MAIN::_dup_74_fibonacci__Loop_2( _pinl_138__flat_196, i, _pinl_147__flat_152, s) ;
  }
  else
  {
  }
  _dlirmov_2399_rep = ( _pinl_148__flat_210 ? _dlirmov_2398_rep : rep );
  _dlirmov_2390__pinl_138__flat_196 = ( _pinl_148__flat_210 ? _dlirmov_2389__pinl_138__flat_196 : _pinl_138__flat_196 );
  _dlirmov_2387_i = ( _pinl_148__flat_210 ? _dlirmov_2386_i : i );
  _dlirmov_2384__pinl_137__flat_60 = ( _pinl_148__flat_210 ? _dlirmov_2383__pinl_137__flat_60 : _pinl_137__flat_60 );
  return( _dlirmov_2399_rep, _dlirmov_2390__pinl_138__flat_196, _dlirmov_2387_i, _dlirmov_2384__pinl_137__flat_60);
}

So here is the computation we exhibited earlier, ie. _add_SxS_ and _gt_SxS_ are used to compute s + rep and checks if rep - 1 > 0, if so it runs _dup_74_fibonacci__Loop_2 again with a decremented rep.

Now the second function _dup_2393_fibonacci__Cond_1 is :

/****************************************************************************
 * Cond function:
 * _MAIN::_dup_2393_fibonacci__Cond_1(...) [ body ]
 ****************************************************************************/
longlong _MAIN::_dup_2393_fibonacci__Cond_1( longlong first { ,NN } , longlong second { ,NN } , int{0} _dlirmov_2385_i { ,NN } , bool _flat_2 { ,NN } , int N { ,NN } )
/*
 *  _dup_2393_fibonacci__Cond_1 ::  ---
 */
{
  longlong first__SSA0_2 { , NN } ;
  longlong first__SSA0_1 { , NN } ;
 
  if (_flat_2)
  {
    first__SSA0_1 = _MAIN::_dup_2392_fibonacci__Loop_0( first, second, _dlirmov_2385_i, N) ;
  }
  else
  {
  }
  first__SSA0_2 = ( _flat_2 ? first__SSA0_1 : first );
  return( first__SSA0_2);
}

so we see it calls _dup_2392_fibonacci__Loop_0 which is :

/****************************************************************************
 * Loop function with Loop Count -1:
 * _MAIN::_dup_2392_fibonacci__Loop_0(...) [ body ]
 ****************************************************************************/
longlong _MAIN::_dup_2392_fibonacci__Loop_0( longlong first { ,NN } , longlong second { ,NN } , int _dlirmov_2385_i { ,NN } , int N { ,NN } )
/*
 *  _dup_2392_fibonacci__Loop_0 ::  ---
 */
{
  longlong _dl_185 { , NN } ;
  int _ctz_170 { , NN } ;
  longlong _pinl_139__flat_128 { , NN } ;
  int _pinl_144__flat_142 { , NN } ;
  bool _pinl_145__flat_196 { , NN } ;
  longlong first__SSA0_3 { , NN } ;
  longlong first__SSA0_2 { , NN } ;
 
  _pinl_139__flat_128 = _mod_SxS_( second, 2LL);
  _dl_185 = _add_SxS_( _pinl_139__flat_128, first);
  _pinl_144__flat_142 = _add_SxS_( 1, _dlirmov_2385_i);
  _ctz_170 = _sub_SxS_( _pinl_144__flat_142, N);
  _pinl_145__flat_196 = _lt_SxS_( _ctz_170, 0);
  if (_pinl_145__flat_196)
  {
    first__SSA0_2 = _MAIN::_dup_2392_fibonacci__Loop_0( second, _dl_185, _pinl_144__flat_142, N) ;
  }
  else
  {
  }
  first__SSA0_3 = ( _pinl_145__flat_196 ? first__SSA0_2 : second );
  return( first__SSA0_3);
}

This is where we see the term rewriting : the _mod_SxS_, _add_SxS_ construct first + second % 2 and this value is passed to that same function (recursion again) as the parameter named second, so we basically construct second = first + second % 2 and do that N times because the _sub_SxS_ followed by the _lt_SxS_ checks for i - N < 0, so this is basically the inner for loop (N times).

In the end, we have two loops which instead of one inside the other, are one after the other, so we compute rep + N times, instead of rep * N times : it's a logarithmic time reduction effect ! So we go from O(t) to O(log(t))

Reasoning with first order approximation, this is a gain of approximately a factor of rep : indeed, since rep << N we have (rep * N)/(rep + N) ~= rep. This means that the C code compiled with gcc should see a running time proportional to rep and the SaC code compiled with sac2c should take a running time very much independent of rep, because it is the computation controlled by N that takes the largest time.

Indeed, if we multiply rep by 2, we find :

gcc -O3
real    0m37.953s
user    0m36.650s
sys    0m0.218s

sac2c -V2
real    0m0.061s
user    0m0.027s
sys    0m0.031s

A bombasting confirmation of my prediction.

So let us summarise the key aspects of SaC optimizations :

1. SaC has lifted the inner loop out of the outside one, in effect producing two independent loops ;
2. this lifting arises from the term rewriting that has allowed the compiler to prove that both loops were in fact independent.

So the SaC compiler sees that the first while computes the useful value of second that is to be injected into the for loop in order to compute the final value of second.

Term rewriting, FP and lifting

So how does SaC do the rewriting ? Let us repeat, because “repetition is the heart of pedagogy” : it uses the axiomatic categorical monadic (whatever that means) facts that x + 0 = x and x-x=0 which applied to the result of the associative rule (x + y) - y = x + (y - y) = x + 0 gives x thus, given y is rep, proving that the final value of second is independent of rep. But once this has been reached, the compiler uses the guaranteed absence of side-effects to effectively lift the inner loop, and basically apply a log to the running time !

About “axiomatic categorical monadic” did you know that the demi-god of mathematical physics, Vladimir Arnold -- who came from Russia to work in France -- taught the elite French students and complained that the typical one, when thinking x * y = y * x comments that “ah yes, multiplication is commutative”. Read Arnold, be enlightened. He’s the epitome of abstraction rooted in humus, or rather melting permafrost.

Why doesn't the standard C compiler do the same thing ?

Probably because those don't like algebraic simplifications,

SBS told me. True, we are not using fields there, so there are some edge effects that can kick back. But that could also be taken into account by the compiler, making sure that the term rewriting is allowed ; SBS again :

C compilers typically refrain from applying associative law, as, strictly speaking, this does not hold on any of the numerical types the hardware supports due to possible overflow/ underflow situations… Whether a C compiler is able to lift out this kind of rather simple loop? Not sure, I would hope that it would detect the absence of side effects in this case….

But given the FP nature of SaC, it doesn't need to look for the absence of side-effects, because... there are none ! More precisely, but we’ll get to that in later posts, SaC clearly singles out the side-effective parts, so for SaC side-effects are easy to find exceptions, to be marked as such so as to warn the optimizer, and not the normal situations, like in C, where you have to look for the absence of side-effects, or equivalently for the absence of the word "monad" in an typical FP conversation. By the way, why didn't I see that word in SaC nor for that matter in ATS, both FP languages ? :thinking:

After sac2c optimised code is then fed to gcc

But let's not forget that once this optimization is done, it feeds the rewritten code to gcc itself, which can now apply its own optimizations.

We can indeed see that when using sac2c it produces a .c file which is quite impressive : it took our 30 LOC original program and output a... 1792 LOC program ! But of course there is a quasi fixed cost, i.e. a quasi fixed overhead : for me, it's like the difference between starting at the gunshot with your legs vs. someone starting a bit later with a dragster, i.e. you need space for the dragster to show its strength, and that is what rep gave to SaC.

Conclusion

Try SaC, build the community, get rid of Matlab and stop eyeing its juiced girlfriend Julia. Also read the next posts.

Exercise

Estimate how many tons of CO2 was produced in the world while you were reading, or more realistically glazing over, that post.