bulk-allocate Value instances in the evaluator

calling GC_malloc for each value is significantly more expensive than
allocating a bunch of values at once with GC_malloc_many. "a bunch" here
is a GC block size, ie 16KiB or less.

this gives a 1.5% performance boost when evaluating our nixos system.

tested with

nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'

 # on master

  Time (mean ± σ):      3.335 s ±  0.007 s    [User: 2.774 s, System: 0.293 s]
  Range (min … max):    3.315 s …  3.347 s    50 runs

 # with this change

  Time (mean ± σ):      3.288 s ±  0.006 s    [User: 2.728 s, System: 0.292 s]
  Range (min … max):    3.274 s …  3.307 s    50 runs

2 files changed, 19 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/src/libexpr/eval.cc b/src/libexpr/eval.cc
index 8cf4d9549..a95726f5f 100644
--- a/src/libexpr/eval.cc
+++ b/src/libexpr/eval.cc
@@ -821,8 +821,23 @@ inline Value * EvalState::lookupVar(Env * env, const ExprVar & var, bool noEval)
 
 Value * EvalState::allocValue()
 {
+    /* We use the boehm batch allocator to speed up allocations of Values (of which there are many).
+       GC_malloc_many returns a linked list of objects of the given size, where the first word
+       of each object is also the pointer to the next object in the list. This also means that we
+       have to explicitly clear the first word of every object we take. */
+    if (!valueAllocCache) {
+        valueAllocCache = GC_malloc_many(sizeof(Value));
+        if (!valueAllocCache) throw std::bad_alloc();
+    }
+
+    /* GC_NEXT is a convenience macro for accessing the first word of an object.
+       Take the first list item, advance the list to the next item, and clear the next pointer. */
+    void * p = valueAllocCache;
+    GC_PTR_STORE_AND_DIRTY(&valueAllocCache, GC_NEXT(p));
+    GC_NEXT(p) = nullptr;
+
     nrValues++;
-    auto v = (Value *) allocBytes(sizeof(Value));
+    auto v = (Value *) p;
     return v;
 }
 
diff --git a/src/libexpr/eval.hh b/src/libexpr/eval.hh
index 1aab8e166..cc63294c6 100644
--- a/src/libexpr/eval.hh
+++ b/src/libexpr/eval.hh
@@ -133,6 +133,9 @@ private:
     /* Cache used by prim_match(). */
     std::shared_ptr<RegexCache> regexCache;
 
+    /* Allocation cache for GC'd Value objects. */
+    void * valueAllocCache = nullptr;
+
 public:
 
     EvalState(