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Why does volatile exist?
I have never used it but I wonder why people use it? What does it exactly do? I searched the forum, I found it only C# or Java topics.
Consider this code,
int some_int = 100;
while(some_int == 100)
{
//your code
}
When this program gets compiled, the compiler may optimize this code, if it finds that the program never ever makes any attempt to change the value of some_int, so it may be tempted to optimize the while loop by changing it from while(some_int == 100) to something which is equivalent to while(true) so that the execution could be fast (since the condition in while loop appears to be true always). (if the compiler doesn't optimize it, then it has to fetch the value of some_int and compare it with 100, in each iteration which obviously is a little bit slow.)
However, sometimes, optimization (of some parts of your program) may be undesirable, because it may be that someone else is changing the value of some_int from outside the program which compiler is not aware of, since it can't see it; but it's how you've designed it. In that case, compiler's optimization would not produce the desired result!
So, to ensure the desired result, you need to somehow stop the compiler from optimizing the while loop. That is where the volatile keyword plays its role. All you need to do is this,
volatile int some_int = 100; //note the 'volatile' qualifier now!
In other words, I would explain this as follows:
volatile tells the compiler that,
"Hey compiler, I'm volatile and, you
know, I can be changed by some XYZ
that you're not even aware of. That
XYZ could be anything. Maybe some
alien outside this planet called
program. Maybe some lightning, some
form of interrupt, volcanoes, etc can
mutate me. Maybe. You never know who
is going to change me! So O you
ignorant, stop playing an all-knowing
god, and don't dare touch the code
where I'm present. Okay?"
Well, that is how volatile prevents the compiler from optimizing code. Now search the web to see some sample examples.
Quoting from the C++ Standard ($7.1.5.1/8)
[..] volatile is a hint to the
implementation to avoid aggressive
optimization involving the object
because the value of the object might
be changed by means undetectable by an
implementation.[...]
Related topic:
Does making a struct volatile make all its members volatile?
In computer programming, particularly in the C, C++, and C# programming languages, a variable or object declared with the volatile keyword usually has special properties related to optimization and/or threading. Generally speaking, the volatile keyword is intended to prevent the (pseudo)compiler from applying any optimizations on the code that assume values of variables cannot change "on their own." (c) Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatile_variable
Related
Is there a difference if it is the first use of the variable or not. For example are a and b treated differently?
void f(bool&a, bool& b)
{
...
a=false;
boost::this_thread::sleep...//1 sec sleep
a=true;
b=true;
...
}
EDIT: people asked why I want to know this.
1. I would like to have some way to tell the compiler not to optimize(swap the order of the execution of the instructions) in some function, and using atomic and or mutexes is much more complicated than using sleep(and in my case sleeping is not a performance problem).
2. Like I said this is generally important to know.
We can't really tell. On scenario could be that the compiler has full introspection to your function at the calling site (and possibly does inline it), in which case it can jumble your function with the caller, and then do optimizations appropriately.
It could then e.g. completely optimize away a and b because there is no code that depends on a and b. Or it might see that you violate aliasing rules so that a and b refer to the same entity, and then merge them according to your program flow.
But it could also be that you tell the compiler to not optimize at all, e.g. with g++'s -O0 flag, in which case not much will happen.
The only proof for your particular platform *, can be made by looking at the generated assembly, or by telling the compiler to please output some log about what it optimizes (g++ has many flags for that).
* compiler+flags used to compile compiler+version+add-ons, hardware, operating system; even the weather might be relevant if your compiler omits some optimizations if it takes to long [which would actually be cool feature for debug builds, imho]
They are not local (because they are references), so it can't, because it can't tell whether the called function sees them or not and has to assume that it does. If they were local variables, it could, because local variables are not visible to the called function unless pointer or reference to them was created.
The const and volatile chapter on the 'Surviving the Release Version' Article gave me the idea that the compiler can use the const keyword as hint for its optimization job.
Do you know some other optimization-hints for the compiler or design principles for functions so that the compiler can make them inline?
By the way, do you declare primitive-type function parameters as const or const reference (like void foo(const int i) or void foo(const int& i))?
Thanks!
It is rare that const qualification can help the compiler to optimize your code. You can read more about why this is the case in Herb Sutter's "Constant Optimization?"
Concerning your last question: in general, you should prefer to pass by value things that are cheap to copy (like fundamental type objects--ints and floats and such--and small class type objects) and pass other types by const reference. This is a very general rule and there are lots of caveats and exceptions.
As soon as you enable some optimization the compiler will notice that the parameter i is never modified, so whether you declare it as int or as const int doesn't matter for the generated code.
The point of passing parameters by const & is to avoid needless copying. In case of small parameters (one machine word or less) this doesn't lead to better performance, so you shouldn't do that. foo(int) is more efficient than foo(const int&).
There's no practical benefit to either form. If the type is less than a single machine word, take it by value. The other thing is that a modern compiler's semantic analysis is way above what const can and can't do, you could only apply optimizations if it was pre-compiled or your code was VERY complex. The article you linked to is several years old and the compiler has done nothing but improve massively since then.
I don't think the compiler can use const keyword for optimization since at any point the constness can be casted away.
It is more for correctness than optimization.
A few "general compiler" things off the top of my head.
const as a hint that a variable will never change
volatile as a hint that a variable can change at any point
restrict keyword
memory barriers (to hint to the compiler a specific ordering) - probably not so much an "optimisation" mind you.
inline keyword (use very carefully)
All that however should only come from an extensive profiling routine so you know what actually needs to be optimised. Compilers in general are pretty good at optimising without much in the way of hints from the programmer.
If you look into the sources of Linux kernel or some such similar projects, you will find all the optimisation clues that are passed on to gcc (or whichever compiler is used). Linux kernel uses every feature that gcc offers even if it is not in the standard.
This page sums up gcc's extensions to the C language. I referred C here because const and volatile are used in C as well. More than C or C++, compiler optimization appears the focus of the question here.
I don't think the real purpose of const has much to do with optimization, though it helps.
Isn't the real value in compile-time checking, to prevent you from modifying things you shouldn't modify, i.e. preventing bugs?
For small arguments that you are not going to modify, use call-by-value.
For large arguments that you are not going to modify, use either call-by-reference or passing the address (which are basically the same thing), along with const.
For large or small arguments that you are going to modify, drop the const.
BTW: In case it's news, for real performance, you need to know how to find the problems you actually have, by profiling. No compiler can do that for you.
See, what I don't get is, why should programs like the following be legal?
int main()
{
static const int i = 0;
i < i > i;
}
I mean, surely, nobody actually has any current programs that have expressions with no side effects in them, since that would be very pointless, and it would make parsing & compiling the language much easier. So why not just disallow them? What benefit does the language actually gain from allowing this kind of syntax?
Another example being like this:
int main() {
static const int i = 0;
int x = (i);
}
What is the actual benefit of such statements?
And things like the most vexing parse. Does anybody, ever, declare functions in the middle of other functions? I mean, we got rid of things like implicit function declaration, and things like that. Why not just get rid of them for C++0x?
Probably because banning then would make the specification more complex, which would make compilers more complex.
it would make parsing & compiling the
language much easier
I don't see how. Why is it easier to parse and compile i < i > i if you're required to issue a diagnostic, than it is to parse it if you're allowed to do anything you damn well please provided that the emitted code has no side-effects?
The Java compiler forbids unreachable code (as opposed to code with no effect), which is a mixed blessing for the programmer, and requires a little bit of extra work from the compiler than what a C++ compiler is actually required to do (basic block dependency analysis). Should C++ forbid unreachable code? Probably not. Even though C++ compilers certainly do enough optimization to identify unreachable basic blocks, in some cases they may do too much. Should if (foo) { ...} be an illegal unreachable block if foo is a false compile-time constant? What if it's not a compile-time constant, but the optimizer has figured out how to calculate the value, should it be legal and the compiler has to realise that the reason it's removing it is implementation-specific, so as not to give an error? More special cases.
nobody actually has any current
programs that have expressions with no
side effects in them
Loads. For example, if NDEBUG is true, then assert expands to a void expression with no effect. So that's yet more special cases needed in the compiler to permit some useless expressions, but not others.
The rationale, I believe, is that if it expanded to nothing then (a) compilers would end up throwing warnings for things like if (foo) assert(bar);, and (b) code like this would be legal in release but not in debug, which is just confusing:
assert(foo) // oops, forgot the semi-colon
foo.bar();
things like the most vexing parse
That's why it's called "vexing". It's a backward-compatibility issue really. If C++ now changed the meaning of those vexing parses, the meaning of existing code would change. Not much existing code, as you point out, but the C++ committee takes a fairly strong line on backward compatibility. If you want a language that changes every five minutes, use Perl ;-)
Anyway, it's too late now. Even if we had some great insight that the C++0x committee had missed, why some feature should be removed or incompatibly changed, they aren't going to break anything in the FCD unless the FCD is definitively in error.
Note that for all of your suggestions, any compiler could issue a warning for them (actually, I don't understand what your problem is with the second example, but certainly for useless expressions and for vexing parses in function bodies). If you're right that nobody does it deliberately, the warnings would cause no harm. If you're wrong that nobody does it deliberately, your stated case for removing them is incorrect. Warnings in popular compilers could pave the way for removing a feature, especially since the standard is authored largely by compiler-writers. The fact that we don't always get warnings for these things suggests to me that there's more to it than you think.
It's convenient sometimes to put useless statements into a program and compile it just to make sure they're legal - e.g. that the types involve can be resolved/matched etc.
Especially in generated code (macros as well as more elaborate external mechanisms, templates where Policies or types may introduce meaningless expansions in some no-op cases), having less special uncompilable cases to avoid keeps things simpler
There may be some temporarily commented code that removes the meaningful usage of a variable, but it could be a pain to have to similarly identify and comment all the variables that aren't used elsewhere.
While in your examples you show the variables being "int" immediately above the pointless usage, in practice the types may be much more complicated (e.g. operator<()) and whether the operations have side effects may even be unknown to the compiler (e.g. out-of-line functions), so any benefit's limited to simpler cases.
C++ needs a good reason to break backwards (and retained C) compatibility.
Why should doing nothing be treated as a special case? Furthermore, whilst the above cases are easy to spot, one could imagine far more complicated programs where it's not so easy to identify that there are no side effects.
As an iteration of the C++ standard, C++0x have to be backward compatible. Nobody can assert that the statements you wrote does not exist in some piece of critical software written/owned by, say, NASA or DoD.
Anyway regarding your very first example, the parser cannot assert that i is a static constant expression, and that i < i > i is a useless expression -- e.g. if i is a templated type, i < i > i is an "invalid variable declaration", not a "useless computation", and still not a parse error.
Maybe the operator was overloaded to have side effects like cout<<i; This is the reason why they cannot be removed now. On the other hand C# forbids non-assignment or method calls expresions to be used as statements and I believe this is a good thing as it makes the code more clear and semantically correct. However C# had the opportunity to forbid this from the very beginning which C++ does not.
Expressions with no side effects can turn up more often than you think in templated and macro code. If you've ever declared std::vector<int>, you've instantiated template code with no side effects. std::vector must destruct all its elements when releasing itself, in case you stored a class for type T. This requires, at some point, a statement similar to ptr->~T(); to invoke the destructor. int has no destructor though, so the call has no side effects and will be removed entirely by the optimizer. It's also likely it will be inside a loop, then the entire loop has no side effects, so the entire loop is removed by the optimizer.
So if you disallowed expressions with no side effects, std::vector<int> wouldn't work, for one.
Another common case is assert(a == b). In release builds you want these asserts to disappear - but you can't re-define them as an empty macro, otherwise statements like if (x) assert(a == b); suddenly put the next statement in to the if statement - a disaster! In this case assert(x) can be redefined as ((void)0), which is a statement that has no side effects. Now the if statement works correctly in release builds too - it just does nothing.
These are just two common cases. There are many more you probably don't know about. So, while expressions with no side effects seem redundant, they're actually functionally important. An optimizer will remove them entirely so there's no performance impact, too.
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Constants and compiler optimization in C++
Let the holy wars begin:
I've heard a number of differing opinions on the usefulness of const in C++. Of course it has uses in member function declarations, etc. But how useful is it as a modifier on variables (or rather, constants)? Does it indeed help the optimizer, if the rest of the code is left the same?
There are a lot of cases where the const modifier won't help the optimizer, for the simple fact that the compiler can already tell if you modified a variable or not. The biggest benefit of const, in my opinion, is that it tells the compiler whether the programmer intended to modify that variable, which is useful in finding certain types of semantic errors at compile time instead of run time. Any error you can move to compile time is a huge boost in programmer productivity.
const does not help the optimizer.
Since const can be cast away with const_cast, it's possible to write programs that use const in a number of places, then cast it away and modify variables anyway, with defined behavior according to the standard. The compiler therefore must look at the actual code of the program to determine which variables are modified when, and it's probably pretty good at this anyway (for example it might determine a non-const variable is invariant over a certain block of code and optimize accordingly).
If the compiler blindly treated const as a guarantee that something won't change, the optimizer would break some well-formed programs.
const is a compile-time feature to help programmers write correct code, by adding some compile-time constraints, and indicating a code contract (eg. 'I promise not to change this parameter'). It has nothing to do with optimization. While invariants are important to optimizers, this has nothing to do with the const keyword.
There is one exception: objects declared with const. These cannot be modified; even if they are via casting, the behavior is undefined. There's some subtlety here:
const int ci = 5;
const_cast<int&>(ci) = 5; // undefined behavior, original object declared const
int i = 5;
const int& ci2 = i; // cannot modify i through ci2, const reference
const_cast<int&>(ci2) = 5; // OK, original object not declared const
So when the compiler sees const int ci it probably does assume it will never, ever change, because modifying it is undefined behavior. However, chances are this isn't the bottleneck in your program, it's just a more sophisticated #define. Apart from that, const is weak - just a keyword for the type system.
In general, no, it will not help the compiler. Since the const-ness can be casted away in a second in both C and C++, it'd be hard for the compiler to make the necessary assumptions about fulfilled code requirements for optimizations.
That said, const-correctness should always be used for its other benefits.
It can't hurt and in theory could allow for some optimizations so you might as well use it - don't know if any production compilers do.
In many languages you're allowed to declare a variable and use it before initializing it.
For example, in C++, you can write a snippet such as:
int x;
cout << x;
This would of course return unpredictable (well, unless you knew how your program was mapping out memory) results, but my question is, why is this behavior allowed by compilers?
Is there some application for or efficiency that results from allowing the use of uninitialized memory?
edit: It occurred to me that leaving initialization up to the user would minimize writes for memory mediums that have limited lifespans (write-cycles). Just a specific example under the aforementioned heading of 'performance'. Thanks.
My thoughts (and I've been wrong before, just ask my wife) are that it's simply a holdover from earlier incarnations of the language.
Early versions of C did not allow you to declare variables anywhere you wanted in a function, they had to be at the top (or maybe at the start of a block, it's hard to remember off the top of my head since I rarely do that nowadays).
In addition, you have the understandable desire to set a variable only when you know what it should be. There's no point in initialising a variable to something if the next thing you're going to do with it is simply overwrite that value (that's where the performance people are coming from here).
That's why it's necessary to allow uninitialised variables though you still shouldn't use them before you initialise them, and the good compilers have warnings to let you know about it.
In C++ (and later incarnations of C) where you can create your variable anywhere in a function, you really should create it and initialise it at the same time. But that wasn't possible early on. You had to use something like:
int fn(void) {
int x, y;
/* Do some stuff to set y */
x = y + 2;
/* Do some more stuff */
}
Nowadays, I'd opt for:
int fn(void) {
int y;
/* Do some stuff to set y */
int x = y + 2;
/* Do some more stuff */
}
The oldest excuse in programming : it improves performance!
edit: read your comments and I agree - years ago the focus on performance was on the number of CPU cycles. My first C compiler was traditional C (the one prior to ANSI C) and it allowed all sorts of abominations to compile. In these modern times performance is about the number of customer complaints. As I tell new graduates we hire - 'I don't care how quickly the program gives a wrong answer'. Use all the tools of modern compilers and development, write less bugs and everyone can go home on time.
Some API's are designed to return data via variables passed in, e.g:
bool ok;
int x = convert_to_int(some_string, &ok);
It may set the value of 'ok' inside the function, so initializing it is a waste.
(I'm not advocating this style of API.)
The short answer is that for more complicated cases, the compiler may not be able to determine whether a variable is used before initialization or not.
eg.
int x;
if (external_function() == 2) {
x = 42;
} else if (another_function() == 3) {
x = 49;
}
yet_another_function( &x );
cout << x; // Is this a use-before-definition?
Good compilers will give a warning message if they can spot a probable use-before-initialize error, but for complex cases - especially involving multiple compilation units - there's no way for the compiler to tell.
As to whether a language should allow the concept of uninitialized variables, that is another matter. C# is slightly unusual in defining every variable as being initialized with a default value. Most languages (C++/C/BCPL/FORTRAN/Assembler/...) leave it up to the programmer as to whether initialization is appropriate. Good compilers can sometimes spot unnecessary initializations and eliminate them, but this isn't a given. Compilers for more obscure hardware tend to have less effort put into optimization (which is the hard part of compiler writing) so languages targeting such hardware tend not to require unnecessary code generation.
Perhaps in some cases, it is faster to leave the memory uninitialised until it is needed (for example, if you return from a function before using a variable). I typically initialise everything anyway, I doubt it makes any real different in performance. The compiler will have its own way of optimising away useless initialisations, I'm sure.
Some languages have default values for some variable types. That being said I doubt there are performance benefits in any language to not explicitly initializing them. However the downsides are:
The possibility that it must be initialized and without being done you risk a crash
Unanticipated values
Lack of clarity and purpose for other programmers
My suggestion is always initialize your variables and the consistency will pay for itself.
Depending on the size of the variable, leaving the value uninitialized in the name of performance might be regarded as micro-optimization. Relatively few programs (when compared to the broad array of software types out there) would be negatively affected by the extra two-or-three cycles necessary to load a double; however, supposing the variable were quite large, delaying initialization until it is abundantly clear initialization is required is probably a good idea.
for loop style
int i;
for(i=0;i<something;++i){
.......
}
do something with i
and you would prefer the for loop to look like for(init;condition;inc)
here's one with an absolute necessity
bool b;
do{
....
b = g();
....
}while(!b);
horizontal screen real estate with long nested names
longer lived scoping for debugging visibility
very occasionally performance