Re: Using libunistring for string comparisons et al

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 5:39 AM, Mike Gran <spk121@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> From:Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>
>>
>> Mike Gran <spk121@yahoo.com> writes:
>> > We do, in a matter of speaking, have a single string representation:
>> > UTF-32.  The 'narrow' encoding is UTF-32 with the initial 3 bytes
>> of
>> > zero removed.
>>
>> Despite the similarity of these two representations, they are
>> sufficiently different that they cannot be handled by the same machine
>> code.  That means you must either implement multiple inner loops, one
>> for each combination of string parameter representations, or else you
>> must dispatch on the string representation within the inner loop.  On
>> modern architectures, wrongly predicted conditional branches are very
>> expensive.
>
> Keep in mind that the UTF-8 forward iterator operation has conditional
> branches.  Merely the act of advancing from one character to another
> could take one of four paths, or more if you include the possibility
> of invalid UTF-8 sequences.

No, technically you don't need any branching:

  /* first-byte lookup table encoded as an integer */
  #define magic 3841982464uL

  /* read a utf8 char and advance the pointer */
  int read_utf8_char(char **pp) {
    char *p = *pp;
    int tmp, len, res = (unsigned char)*p++;

    tmp = (res>>7);
    /* tmp is 0 if len is 1, 1 otherwise */
    len = (res>>4)*2;
    len = tmp*(((magic&(3<<len))>>len)+1) + (1-tmp);
    res = ((res<<len)&255)>>len;
    res = (tmp*((res<<6)+(63&*p))) + (1-tmp)*res;
    p += tmp;
    tmp = (len-1)>>1;
    /* tmp is 1 if len is 3,4 0 otherwise */
    res = (tmp*((res<<6)+(63&*p))) + (1-tmp)*res;
    p += tmp;
    tmp = len>>2;
    /* tmp is 1 if len is 4, 0 otherwise */
    res = (tmp*((res<<6)+(63&*p))) + (1-tmp)*res;
    p += tmp;

    *pp = p;
    return res;
  }

It turns out this isn't worth it on x86 architectures.
Branch prediction is very fast.  Either way, the
overhead tends to be dwarfed by whatever it is
you're doing _with_ the char.

-- 
Alex