Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Sir Terry Pratchett
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
gcc is smarter than you
gcc is pretty clever. Consider the following C program:
#include <stdio.h> /* printf() */
int factorial(int n) {
return n == 0 ? 1 : n * factorial(n - 1);
}
int main() {
int n = 10;
printf("factorial(%d) = %d\n", n, factorial(n));
return 0;
}
On my version of gcc (4.3.2 on debian testing), when compiled with no optimizaitons, or -O1, it generates code for factorial() like you'd expect, using a recursive call to compute the value. But on -O2, it does something interesting: It compiles down to a tight loop:
factorial:
.LFB13:
testl %edi, %edi
movl $1, %eax
je .L3
.p2align 4,,10
.p2align 3
.L4:
imull %edi, %eax
subl $1, %edi
jne .L4
.L3:
rep
ret
Pretty impressive. The recursive call (not even tail-recursive) has been completely eliminated, so factorial now uses O(1) stack space instead of O(N). And although I have only very superficial knowledge of x86 assembly (actually AMD64 in this case, but I don't think any of the AMD64 extensions are being used above), I doubt that you could write a better version by hand. But what really blew my mind was the code that it generated on -O3. The implementation of factorial stayed the same. But main() changed:
main:
.LFB14:
subq $8, %rsp
.LCFI0:
movl $3628800, %edx
movl $10, %esi
movl $.LC0, %edi
xorl %eax, %eax
call printf
xorl %eax, %eax
addq $8, %rsp
ret
See the "movl $3628800, %edx" line? gcc is pre-computing factorial(10) at compile-time. It doesn't even call factorial(). Incredible. My hat is off to the gcc development team.
Of course, all the usual disclaimers apply, this is just a toy example, premature optimization is the root of all evil, etc, etc, but it illustrates that compilers are often smarter than you think. If you think you can do a better job by hand, you're almost certainly wrong.
