Re: Using __builtin_expect (likely/unlikely macros)

[Óscar Fuentes]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

> Óscar Fuentes wrote:
>>> For improvements where the
>>> generated code is "obviously" faster (fewer and simpler instructions,
>>> say), I typically don't bother with measurements as my own time is
>>> limited too.
>> You will be surprised.
>>
>> Modern hardware is complex.
>
> I'm often surprised :-), but I don't expect to be surprised when the
> generated code seems obviously faster to me. Although I'm not as
> expert as the computer architecture researcher whose office sits next
> to mine, I know how modern hardware works reasonably well and
> regularly give lectures on topics like μops and TLBs so I won't be
> surprised as often as a naive programmer might be.

I served many years as an Assembler programmer replacing C code where it
was considered too slow so, excuse my arrogance, I'm far from being a
naive programmer.

I've seen many times cases where removing code (deleting unnecessary
instructions and even full procedure calls) made the program run
noticeably slower. "noticeably" as in "you don't need a stopwatch to
notice it".

Also, I've seen plenty of speedups on my development machine that
vanished or even reversed when tried on a different microarchitecture,
or the same microarchitecture with different cache sizes, or even the
same CPU with different RAM modules.

On our time of multi-level caches, branch prediction, speculative
execution and what-not, acting as if your hard-earned 1% speedup will
apply to most machines out there is a risky bet.

>> If the 1.3% improvement in performance requires non-minimal source
>> code complexity growth
>
> It doesn't. In this case the source code shrank slightly. Only very
> slightly: just by 0.001% (this counts all files under Git control).
> Still, a win's a win.

Yea, but now everybody has to learn about and, worse, deal with those
non-standard macros. That's added complexity. And I'm pretty sure that
the speedup will vanish as code is modified and compilers and CPUs
change.