Hello :-)
I am always impressed by the power of the GCC optimizer. Today I found
a somewhat surprising abnormality when using compound-expressions.
Look at the two definitions for the function f(a) = a*a + a:
int64_t f1( int64_t a ) {
return a * a + a;
}
int64_t f2( int64_t a ) {
return ({
int64_t b;
b = a * a;
({
int64_t c;
c = b + a;
c;
});
});
}
I expected that GCC would either make a mess with the second
definition, or would smartly produce the same code for both
definitions. I was wrong. Here is the (simplified) x86-64 output of
with -O3:
f1:
leaq 1(%rdi), %rax
imulq %rdi, %rax
ret
f2:
movq %rdi, %rax
imulq %rdi, %rax
addq %rdi, %rax
ret
The code for f2 is what I expected, but if I was a little smarter (and
knew more asm) I might have instead expected f1. The code for f1
basically does
b := a + 1
b := b * a
Whereas the code for f2 does:
b := a
b := b * a
b := b
The code for f1 is clearly better, saving on one instruction. They
are, of course, completely equivalent.
So why is GCC failing to optimize the compound expressions all the
way? My guess would be that it has to do with the order in which some
optimization passes are happening. Anyone?
(I actually have a use case of compiling into C that outputs code that
looks like f2 instead of f1)
Be well,
Bruno
