From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
To: Alex Gramiak <agrambot@gmail.com>
Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Using __builtin_expect (likely/unlikely macros)
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2019 18:23:08 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <83bm16gejn.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <871s22jyyo.fsf@gmail.com> (message from Alex Gramiak on Mon, 15 Apr 2019 23:33:51 -0600)
> From: Alex Gramiak <agrambot@gmail.com>
> Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2019 23:33:51 -0600
>
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
> > I'm not sure whether you put LIKELY and UNLIKELY somewhat randomly,
> > just for testing, or did you really think each place is
> > likely/unlikely as in the change, but at least some places in xdisp.c
> > are wrong: they use LIKELY where UNLIKELY is more appropriate, abd
> > vice versa.
>
> Out of curiosity, which places would that be? I only put UNLIKELY calls
> around the checks for emacs_abort (which I presume to be unlikely), and
> the LIKELY calls are of the form:
>
> else if (LIKELY (<cond>))
> {
> ...
> }
> else
> emacs_abort ();
OK, it's possible that I don't understand the exact semantics of
__builtin_expect in these situations.
The problem is that you used LIKELY like this:
if (A)
do_A;
else if (B)
do_B;
else if (C)
do_C;
else if (LIKELY (D))
do_D;
else
cant_happen ();
Essentially, the above is a moral equivalent of a 'switch' with the
'default' case aborting because it "cannot happen". In such code, the
order of the clauses doesn't necessarily tell anything about their
likelihood; up front, they all are equally "likely". So using LIKELY
only in the last one sends a wrong signal: that last condition is
neither more nor less likely than all the others. Actually, in some
cases it might be _less_ likely than the preceding ones, because if I
knew that some of these conditions happens much more frequently, I'd
test it first.
Now, it's possible that the effect of __builtin_expect doesn't care
about this issue. The GCC manual doesn't help to figure out whether
this is the case, because it only talks about a simple case of a
single 'if' clause, and doesn't tell any details about what GCC is
allowed to do when it sees __builtin_expect. But just by looking at
how the code looks, I immediately raised a brow.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-04-16 15:23 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 45+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-04-15 0:15 Using __builtin_expect (likely/unlikely macros) Alex Gramiak
2019-04-15 1:18 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-15 3:11 ` Alex Gramiak
2019-04-15 4:41 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-16 0:16 ` Alex Gramiak
2019-04-16 2:34 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-04-16 5:33 ` Alex Gramiak
2019-04-16 15:23 ` Eli Zaretskii [this message]
2019-04-16 15:47 ` Alex Gramiak
2019-04-16 3:42 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-16 13:05 ` Stefan Monnier
2019-04-16 15:22 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-16 16:10 ` Alex Gramiak
2019-04-16 17:54 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-16 20:50 ` Alex Gramiak
2019-04-16 21:11 ` Alex Gramiak
2019-04-16 21:27 ` Stefan Monnier
2019-04-16 21:27 ` Konstantin Kharlamov
2019-04-18 8:25 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-18 8:43 ` Konstantin Kharlamov
2019-04-18 13:47 ` Andy Moreton
2019-04-18 17:27 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-18 17:56 ` Andy Moreton
2019-04-18 19:32 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-19 13:45 ` Alex Gramiak
2019-04-19 13:58 ` Konstantin Kharlamov
2019-04-19 14:45 ` Alex Gramiak
2019-04-19 17:33 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-19 20:53 ` Alex Gramiak
2019-04-20 0:05 ` Alan Mackenzie
2019-04-20 0:42 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-20 19:46 ` Alan Mackenzie
2019-04-20 15:29 ` Andy Moreton
2019-04-20 15:57 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-20 16:03 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-04-20 16:11 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-20 16:18 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-04-20 16:57 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-20 17:22 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-04-20 19:13 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-20 16:28 ` Óscar Fuentes
2019-04-20 18:58 ` Paul Eggert
2019-04-20 19:35 ` Óscar Fuentes
2019-04-20 22:54 ` Paul Eggert
2020-04-15 3:14 ` John Carter
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