On Thu, Sep 16, 2021 at 5:50 PM enh <[email protected]> wrote: > plus testing for _equality_ can (as mentioned earlier) have slightly > different properties from the three-way comparator behavior of > bcmp()/memcmp(). >
llvm-libc's implementation only returns the boolean, though. The mem* functions are extremely sensitive to instruction cache effects, so having 3 unique implementations (__memcmpeq, bcmp, memcmp) that do similar, but subtly different things can be a hidden performance cost--one that is hard to demonstrate with a microbenchmark. Our experience developing optimized mem* routines ended up showing better performance in actual applications when we accepted seemingly worse microbenchmark performance by optimizing for code footprint instead (more extensive notes for mem* in general <https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/4f7c3da72d557ed418828823a8e59942859d677f.pdf> and memcmp specifically (section 4.4) <https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/e52f61fd2c51e8962305120548581efacbc06ffc.pdf> ). The alternative would be to alias (as the NOTES suggest as a possible implementation), but I think that raises James' question of why not just use bcmp? Dependencies on non-boolean implementations of bcmp seem rare--namely, I haven't actually seen one. > On Thu, Sep 16, 2021 at 2:43 PM Joseph Myers <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On Thu, 16 Sep 2021, James Y Knight wrote: >> >> > Wouldn't it be far simpler to just un-deprecate bcmp? >> >> The aim is to have something to which calls can be generated in all >> standards modes. bcmp has never been part of ISO C; there's nothing to >> undeprecate there. > > >> -- >> Joseph S. Myers >> [email protected] >> >
