Re: [boost] [dynamic_bitset] Using of GCC built-in functions may increase performance of some methods

Subject: Re: [boost] [dynamic_bitset] Using of GCC built-in functions may increase performance of some methods
From: Marshall Clow (mclow.lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-08-26 01:42:10

On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 2:03 PM, Evgeny Shulgin via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> Hi all, when I was playing around the Boost.DynamicBitset library, I
> noticed the last lines of the count() function (which returns the number of
> bits in the bitset that are set):
>
> return do_count(m_bits.begin(), num_blocks(), Block(0),
>     static_cast<value_to_type<(bool)mode> *>(0));
>
> Well, this line was modified 10 years ago last time.
>
> Let's go deeper. GNU C provides several language features not found in ISO
> standard C. These include a bunch of bit operations - you can look at them
> here: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Other-Builtins.html.
> For example, *__builtin_popcountll *counts the number of bits in an
> 'unsigned long long', so we can use this kind of code to calculate bits
> (don't judge, I wrote this fast and didn't think of coding standards):
>
> size_type res = 0;
> for (size_type i = 0; i < m_bits.size(); i++) {
>     res += __builtin_popcountll(m_bits[i]);
> }
>
> I checked that m_bits[] and popcount() both work with 64-bit values on my
> machine. It halved the running time of a program that has a bitset and
> calls count() over and over again - here's the code
> <https://gist.github.com/Izaron/5005fed4184ee6483699191dc5ef3677> I used.
> These __builtin_XXX functions can be used everywhere where it's possible,
> with preprocessor directives. Or is it actually used and longer time means
> something else?
>
>
By a curious coincidence, I have been working in that part of libc++ ;-)
You can take a look here:
    https://github.com/llvm-mirror/libcxx/blob/master/include/bit

Gcc and clang have provided the bit intrinsics for a long, long time -
since before libc++ cares about. Boost's mileage may vary.
The MSVC intrinsics are missing (for my purposes) important things - like
"noexcept" and "constexpr".

-- Marshall