On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 02:44:04PM +0100, Alejandro Colomar via Gcc wrote:
> > I don't see any problem with the code snippets you provided.
>
> Well, then the optimization may be the other way around (although I question
> why it is implemented that way, and not the other way around, but I'm not a
> hardware or libc guy, so there may be reasons).
>
> If calling memcpy(3) is better, then the code calling mempcpy(3) could be
> expanded inline to call it (but I doubt it).
>
> If calling mempcpy(3) is better, then the hand-made pattern resembling
> mempcpy(3) should probably be merged as a call to mempcpy(3).
>
> But acting different on equivalent calls to both of them seems inconsistent
> to me, unless you trust the programmer to know better how to optimize, that
> is...
I think that is the case, plus the question if one can use a non-standard
function to implement a standard function (and if it would be triggered
by seeing an expected prototype for the non-standard function).
Otherwise, whether mempcpy in libc is implemented as memcpy + tweak return
value or has its own implementation is something that is heavily dependent
on the target and changes over time, so hardcoding that in gcc is
problematic. For -Os mempcpy call might be very well smaller even if the
library side is then slower.
Jakub
