i have this line of code:
base_num = (arr[j]/base)%256;
This line runs in a loop and the operations "/" and "%" take a lot of resources and time to perform. I would like to change this line and apply bit operations in order to maximize the program performance. How can i do that?
Thanks.
If base is the nth power of two, you can replace division by it with a bitshift of n to the right. Then, since taking the mod 256 of an integer is equivalent to taking its last 8 bits, you can AND it with 0xFF. Alternately, you can reverse the operations if you AND it with 256*base and then bitshift n to the right.
base_num = arr[j] >> n;
base_num &= 0xFF;
Of course, any half-decent compiler should be able to do this for you.
Add -O1 or greater to your compiler options and the compiler will do it for you.
In gcc, -O1 turns on -ftree-slsr which is, according to the docs,
Perform straight-line strength reduction on trees. This recognizes related expressions involving multiplications and replaces them by less expensive calculations when possible.
This will replace the modulo, and the base if it is constant. However, if you know that the base will be some non-constant power of two, you can refactor the surrounding code to give you the log2 of that number, and >> by that amount minus one.
You could also just declare base_num as an 8 bit integer:
#include <stdint.h>
uint8_t base_num;
uint16_t crap;
crap = 0xFF00;
base_num = crap;
If your compiler is standards compliment, it will put the value of byte(0xFF00) (0x00) into base_num.
I have yet to meet a compiler that does saturated arithmetic in plain C (neither C++ or C#), but if it does, it will put the value of sat_byte(0xFF00) which being greater than 0xFF, it will put 0xFF into base_num.
Keep in mind your compiler will warn you of a loss of precision in this instance. Your compiler may error out in this case (Visual Studio does with Treat Warnings as Errors On). If that happens, you can just do:
base_num = (uint8_t)crap;
but this seems like what you are trying to avoid.
What you are trying to do it seems is to remove the modulus operator as that requires a division and division is the most costly basic arithmetic operation. I generally would not think of this as a bottleneck in any way as any "intelligent" compiler (even in debug mode) would "optimize" it to:
base_num = crap & 0xFF;
on a supported platform (every mainstream processor I've heard of - x86, AMD64, ARM, MIPS), which should be any. I would be dumbfounded to hear of a processor that has no basic AND and OR arithmetic instructions.
Related
I'm trying to figure out how does this code work, but I can't manage to get a single answer.
#define testbit(x, y) ( ( ((const char*) & (x))[(y)>>3] & 0x80 >> ((y)&0x07)) >> (7-((y)&0x07) ) )
I'm new at pointers, so if you can figure out a way to explain this in simplified english, I would really appreciate it.
It belongs to a segment of code for an X-Plane Plug-in found at https://code.google.com/p/xplugins/source/browse/trunk/Xsaitekpanels/SwitchPanel.cpp?r=38 line=19
The macro tests the value of the y-th bit in x. You can't directly address bits, so the code starts by treating x as an array of bytes (the const char* cast).
It then looks up the byte where the bit lives. There are 8 bits in a byte, so it divides by 8. Chasing performance, instead of simply dividing by 8, the code uses the binary trick of shifting right 3 places. In general, for unsigned x and y, x >> y = x/2^y, and x << y = x*2^y.
At this point you need to test the bit within the byte, so you get the remainder of y/8. Yet another bit trick, using y & 7 instead of the clearer y % 8.
With this information you can make a mask, a single on bit, 0x80 and shift it into position to test the y%8-th bit. The mask is ANDed against the byte and a non-zero result here means the bit was set to 1, otherwise 0.
Completing #RhythmicFistman's answer
#RhythmicFistman's answer is missing one small part to it and that is the last step in the shifts.
The >> (7-((y)&0x07) step ensures that you only ever get a result of 1 or 0. With this code it is safe to do comparisons like:
if (testbit(varible, 6) == 1) {
// do something
}
Where without that step testbit would return a bit mask in which the 6th bit would be set to 1 or 0 and all the other bits are always set to 0. That is the intent but it is not implemented in what is considered a portable way, see Warning 3 below.
Possible issues with using this code
Now to add something to the other answers. The other answers have not pointed out some keywords that should be mentioned here and they are strict aliasing and shift arithmetic right. My elaboration will come in the form of warnings below.
Warning 1: Endianness
This code assumes that you are using a big endian architecture or only wish to get the correct bit from an array of chars.
The reason is that if you convert an int into an array of chars (bytes) you will get different results on a big endian machine vs a little endian machine.
Warning 2: Strict Aliasing
The macro makes use of a cast (const char*) &(x) which is designed to change the type, a.k.a. alias, of (x) so that it is easier to get to the correct bits.
This is dangerous and the reason why is explained beautifully in this SO answer. The short version is that if you compile this code with optimisations strange things can happen.
The wikipedia pages on Aliasing and Pointer Aliasing are also useful and should be read.
Warning 3: Shift Arithmetic Right
In addition to this there could be a potential issue with the way this code uses the right shift operator >>. This operator has two different behaviors depending on whether the variable it is operating on is signed or unsigned. So long as you never use negative numbers you will be safe but this code will not protect you against that mistake. I suspect though, that you're less likely to make such a mistake anyway so it should be ok to use it.
Also worth mentioning, you are using signed char and are shifting it right. Though this works I would prefer unsigned char which would improve portability because it will not risk generating an arithmetic shift right when char and int are the same width (which is almost never the case in practice, granted). This works because char is promoted to int for the shift, see this SO answer for an explanation.
What you see is a macro, that make the following job :
(In order)
Make a bit shift to y (value : 3)
That take the address of x and pick the character in position y (into the string x)
Make a binary operation between the selected char and 0x80
Make a bit shift to the previous result (value: result of binary operation between y and 0x7)
Make a bit shift ti the previous result (value: 7 - (result of binary operation between y and 0x7))
Well, this is help you? I don't think so!
Because this macro is clairly unproper, and kind of tricky.
Bit mask, Binary operation, Binary shift...
If you can explain more precisly what you want to understand in this, maybe i can be helpfull.
Does using bitwise operations in normal flow or conditional statements like for, if, and so on increase overall performance and would it be better to use them where possible? For example:
if(i++ & 1) {
}
vs.
if(i % 2) {
}
Unless you're using an ancient compiler, it can already handle this level of conversion on its own. That is to say, a modern compiler can and will implement i % 2 using a bitwise AND instruction, provided it makes sense to do so on the target CPU (which, in fairness, it usually will).
In other words, don't expect to see any difference in performance between these, at least with a reasonably modern compiler with a reasonably competent optimizer. In this case, "reasonably" has a pretty broad definition too--even quite a few compilers that are decades old can handle this sort of micro-optimization with no difficulty at all.
TL;DR Write for semantics first, optimize measured hot-spots second.
At the CPU level, integer modulus and divisions are among the slowest operations. But you are not writing at the CPU level, instead you write in C++, which your compiler translates to an Intermediate Representation, which finally is translated into assembly according to the model of CPU for which you are compiling.
In this process, the compiler will apply Peephole Optimizations, among which figure Strength Reduction Optimizations such as (courtesy of Wikipedia):
Original Calculation Replacement Calculation
y = x / 8 y = x >> 3
y = x * 64 y = x << 6
y = x * 2 y = x << 1
y = x * 15 y = (x << 4) - x
The last example is perhaps the most interesting one. Whilst multiplying or dividing by powers of 2 is easily converted (manually) into bit-shifts operations, the compiler is generally taught to perform even smarter transformations that you would probably think about on your own and who are not as easily recognized (at the very least, I do not personally immediately recognize that (x << 4) - x means x * 15).
This is obviously CPU dependent, but you can expect that bitwise operations will never take more, and typically take less, CPU cycles to complete. In general, integer / and % are famously slow, as CPU instructions go. That said, with modern CPU pipelines having a specific instruction complete earlier doesn't mean your program necessarily runs faster.
Best practice is to write code that's understandable, maintainable, and expressive of the logic it implements. It's extremely rare that this kind of micro-optimisation makes a tangible difference, so it should only be used if profiling has indicated a critical bottleneck and this is proven to make a significant difference. Moreover, if on some specific platform it did make a significant difference, your compiler optimiser may already be substituting a bitwise operation when it can see that's equivalent (this usually requires that you're /-ing or %-ing by a constant).
For whatever it's worth, on x86 instructions specifically - and when the divisor is a runtime-variable value so can't be trivially optimised into e.g. bit-shifts or bitwise-ANDs, the time taken by / and % operations in CPU cycles can be looked up here. There are too many x86-compatible chips to list here, but as an arbitrary example of recent CPUs - if we take Agner's "Sunny Cove (Ice Lake)" (i.e. 10th gen Intel Core) data, DIV and IDIV instructions have a latency between 12 and 19 cycles, whereas bitwise-AND has 1 cycle. On many older CPUs DIV can be 40-60x worse.
By default you should use the operation that best expresses your intended meaning, because you should optimize for readable code. (Today most of the time the scarcest resource is the human programmer.)
So use & if you extract bits, and use % if you test for divisibility, i.e. whether the value is even or odd.
For unsigned values both operations have exactly the same effect, and your compiler should be smart enough to replace the division by the corresponding bit operation. If you are worried you can check the assembly code it generates.
Unfortunately integer division is slightly irregular on signed values, as it rounds towards zero and the result of % changes sign depending on the first operand. Bit operations, on the other hand, always round down. So the compiler cannot just replace the division by a simple bit operation. Instead it may either call a routine for integer division, or replace it with bit operations with additional logic to handle the irregularity. This may depends on the optimization level and on which of the operands are constants.
This irregularity at zero may even be a bad thing, because it is a nonlinearity. For example, I recently had a case where we used division on signed values from an ADC, which had to be very fast on an ARM Cortex M0. In this case it was better to replace it with a right shift, both for performance and to get rid of the nonlinearity.
C operators cannot be meaningfully compared in therms of "performance". There's no such thing as "faster" or "slower" operators at language level. Only the resultant compiled machine code can be analyzed for performance. In your specific example the resultant machine code will normally be exactly the same (if we ignore the fact that the first condition includes a postfix increment for some reason), meaning that there won't be any difference in performance whatsoever.
Here is the compiler (GCC 4.6) generated optimized -O3 code for both options:
int i = 34567;
int opt1 = i++ & 1;
int opt2 = i % 2;
Generated code for opt1:
l %r1,520(%r11)
nilf %r1,1
st %r1,516(%r11)
asi 520(%r11),1
Generated code for opt2:
l %r1,520(%r11)
nilf %r1,2147483649
ltr %r1,%r1
jhe .L14
ahi %r1,-1
oilf %r1,4294967294
ahi %r1,1
.L14: st %r1,512(%r11)
So 4 extra instructions...which are nothing for a prod environment. This would be a premature optimization and just introduce complexity
Always these answers about how clever compilers are, that people should not even think about the performance of their code, that they should not dare to question Her Cleverness The Compiler, that bla bla bla… and the result is that people get convinced that every time they use % [SOME POWER OF TWO] the compiler magically converts their code into & ([SOME POWER OF TWO] - 1). This is simply not true. If a shared library has this function:
int modulus (int a, int b) {
return a % b;
}
and a program launches modulus(135, 16), nowhere in the compiled code there will be any trace of bitwise magic. The reason? The compiler is clever, but it did not have a crystal ball when it compiled the library. It sees a generic modulus calculation with no information whatsoever about the fact that only powers of two will be involved and it leaves it as such.
But you can know if only powers of two will be passed to a function. And if that is the case, the only way to optimize your code is to rewrite your function as
unsigned int modulus_2 (unsigned int a, unsigned int b) {
return a & (b - 1);
}
The compiler cannot do that for you.
Bitwise operations are much faster.
This is why the compiler will use bitwise operations for you.
Actually, I think it will be faster to implement it as:
~i & 1
Similarly, if you look at the assembly code your compiler generates, you may see things like x ^= x instead of x=0. But (I hope) you are not going to use this in your C++ code.
In summary, do yourself, and whoever will need to maintain your code, a favor. Make your code readable, and let the compiler do these micro optimizations. It will do it better.
This is more of a philosophical question, but I've seen this a bunch of times in codebases here and there and do not really understand how this programming method came to be.
Suppose you have to set bits 2 and 3 to some value x without changing the other values in the uint. Doing so is pretty trivial and a common task, and I would be inclined to do it this way:
uint8_t someval = 0xFF; //some random previous value
uint8_t x = 0x2; //some random value to assign.
someval = (somval & ~0xC) | (x << 2); //Set the value to 0x2 for bits 2-3
I've seen code that instead or using '|' uses '+':
uint8_t someval = 0xFF; //some random previous value
uint8_t x = 0x2; //some random value to assign.
someval = (somval & ~0xC) + (x << 2); //Set the value to 0x2 for bits 2-3
Are they equivalent?
Yes.
Is one better than the other?
Only if your hardware doesn't have a bitwise OR instruction, but I have never ever ever seen a processor that didn't have a bitwise OR (even small PIC10 processors have an OR instruction).
So why would some programmers be inclined to use '+' instead of '|'? Am I missing some really obvious, uber powerful optimization here?
If you want to perform bitwise operations, use bitwise operators.
If you want to perform arithmetic operations, use arithmetic operators.
It's true that for some values some arithmetic operations can be implemented as simple bitwise operations, but that's essentially an implementation detail to which you should never expose your readers. First and foremost the logic of the code should be clear and if possible self-explanatory. The compiler will choose appropriate low-level operations for you to implement your desire.
That's being philanthropic.
Are they equivalent?
Yes, as long as the bitfield being written to is clear beforehand. Otherwise, they'll go wrong in slightly different ways.
Is one better than the other?
No, although some would say that bitwise operations express the intent more clearly.
So why would some programmers be inclined to use '+' instead of '|'?
Because they're equivalent, and neither is particularly better than the other.
Am I missing some really obvious, uber powerful optimization here?
No.
So why would some programmers be inclined to use '+' instead of '|'?
+ could bring out logical bugs faster. a | a would appear to work, whereas a simple a + a definitely wouldn't (of course, depends on the logic, but the + version is more error-prone).
Of course you should stick to the standard way of doing things (use bitwise operations when you want a bitwise operation, and arithmetic operations when you want to do math).
It's just a question of style. Any modern CPU will complete both operations in the same number of cycles (typically 1). Personally I prefer | in these cases since it more explicitly states to the code reader that you're doing bit twiddling instead of arithmetic.
If you have a bug in your code, then using + could lead to strange behavior, whereas using | would tend to mask the bug. For example, if you accidentally include the same bit twice, ORing it again is a no-op, but adding it will clear the bit and carry up into the next bit (and possibly farther, if more bits are set). So that would usually lead to fail-fast behavior instead of failure-masking behavior, which is generally preferable.
I've seen this a couple of times, but it seems to me that using the bitwise shift left hinders readability. Why is it used? Is it faster than just multiplying by 2?
You should use * when you are multiplying, and << when you are bit shifting. They are mathematically equivalent, but have different semantic meanings. If you are building a flag field, for example, use bit shifting. If you are calculating a total, use multiplication.
It is faster on old compilers that don't optimize the * 2 calls by emitting a left shift instruction. That optimization is really easy to detect and any decent compiler already does.
If it affects readability, then don't use it. Always write your code in the most clear and concise fashion first, then if you have speed problems go back and profile and do hand optimizations.
It's used when you're concerned with the individual bits of the data you're working with. For example, if you want to set the upper byte of a word to 0x9A, you would not write
n |= 0x9A * 256
You'd write:
n |= 0x9A << 8
This makes it clearer that you're working with bits, rather than the data they represent.
For some architectures, bit shifting is faster than multiplying. However, any compiler worth its salt will optimize *2 (or any multiplication by a power of 2) to a left bit shift (when a bit shift would be faster).
For readability of values used as bitfields:
enum Flags { UP = (1<<0),
DOWN = (1<<1),
STRANGE = (1<<2),
CHARM = (1<<3),
...
which I think is preferable to either '=1,...,=2,...=4' or '=1,...=2, =2*2,...=2*3' especially if you have 8+ flags.
If you are using a old C compiler, it is preferrable to use bitwise. For readability you can comment you code though.
I'm talking about this:
If we have the letter 'A' which is 77 in decimal and 4D in Hex.
I am looking for the fastest way to get D.
I thought about two ways:
Given x is a byte.
x << 4; x >> 4
x %= 16
Any other ways? Which one is faster?
Brevity is nice - explanations are better :)
x &= 0x0f
is, of course, the right answer. It exactly expresses the intent of what you're trying to achieve, and on any sane architecture will always compile down to the minimum number of instructions (i.e. 1). Do use hex rather than decimal whenever you put constants in a bit-wise operator.
x <<= 4; x >>= 4
will only work if your 'byte' is a proper unsigned type. If it was actually a signed char then the second operation might cause sign extension (i.e. your original bit 3 would then appear in bits 4-7 too).
without optimization this will of course take 2 instructions, but with GCC on OSX, even -O1 will reduce this to the first answer.
x %= 16
even without the optimizer enabled your compiler will almost certainly do the right thing here and turn that expensive div/mod operation into the first answer. However it can only do that for powers of two, and this paradigm doesn't make it quite so obvious what you're trying to achieve.
I always use x &= 0x0f
There are many good answers and some of them are technically the right ones.
In a broader scale, one should understand that C/C++ is not an assembler. Programmer's job is to try to tell to the compiler the intention what you want to achieve. The compiler will pick the best way to do it depending on the architecture and various optimization flags.
x &= 0x0F; is the most clear way to tell the compiler what you want to achieve. If shifting up and down is faster on some architecture, it is the compiler's job to know it and do the right thing.
Single AND operation can do it.
x = (x & 0x0F);
It will depend on on the architecture to some extent - shifting up and back down on an ARM is probably the fastest way - however the compiler should do that for you. In fact, all of the suggested methods will probably be optimized to the same code by the compiler.
x = x & 15