From: Willy Tarreau w@1wt.eu
Sent: 09 October 2022 19:36
...
By the way, just for the sake of completeness, the one that consistently gives me a better output is this one:
size_t strlen(const char *str) { const char *s0 = str--;
while (*++str) ; return str - s0;}
Which gives me this:
0000000000000000 <strlen>: 0: 48 8d 47 ff lea -0x1(%rdi),%rax 4: 48 ff c0 inc %rax 7: 80 38 00 cmpb $0x0,(%rax) a: 75 f8 jne 4 <len+0x4> c: 48 29 f8 sub %rdi,%rax f: c3 ret
But this is totally ruined by the addition of asm() in the loop. However I suspect that the construct is difficult to match against a real strlen() since it starts on an extra character, thus placing the asm() statement before the loop could durably preserve it. It does work here (the code remains the exact same one), but for how long, that's the question. Maybe we can revisit the various loop-based functions in the future with this in mind.
clang wilfully and persistently generates:
strlen: # @strlen movq $-1, %rax .LBB0_1: # =>This Inner Loop Header: Depth=1 cmpb $0, 1(%rdi,%rax) leaq 1(%rax), %rax jne .LBB0_1 retq
But feed the C for that into gcc and it generates a 'jmp strlen' at everything above -O1. I suspect that might run with less clocks/byte than the code above.
Somewhere I hate some complier pessimisations. Substituting a call to strlen() is typical. strlen() is almost certainly optimised for long strings. If the string is short the coded loop will be faster. The same is true (and probably more so) for memcpy.
David
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