Re: Set operations on bool-vectors

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:49:00 -0700
> From: Daniel Colascione <address@hidden>
> Cc: Emacs development discussions <address@hidden>
> 
> >> +static inline
> >> +EMACS_INT
> >> +popcount_size_t(size_t val)
> >> +{
> >> +  EMACS_INT count;
> >> +
> >> +#if defined __GNUC__ && BITS_PER_SIZE_T == 64
> >> +  count = __builtin_popcountll (val);
> >> +#elif defined __GNUC__ && BITS_PER_SIZE_T == 32
> >> +  count = __builtin_popcount (val);
> >> +#elif defined __MSC_VER && BITS_PER_SIZE_T == 64
> >> +# pragma intrinsic __popcnt64
> >> +  count = __popcnt64 (val);
> >> +#elif defined __MSC_VER && BITS_PER_SIZE_T == 32
> >> +# pragma intrinsic __popcnt
> >> +  count = __popcnt (val);
> >> +#else
> >> +  {
> >> +    EMACS_INT j;
> >> +    count = 0;
> >> +    for (j = 0; j < BITS_PER_SIZE_T; ++j)
> >> +      count += !!((((size_t) 1) << j) & val);
> >> +  }
> >> +#endif
> > 
> > Why loop? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_weight.
> 
> I didn't want to put a lot of effort into a code path we'll probably
> never use.  Recall that if we're using icc or gcc or Visual C++ or
> Clang, we'll be using a compiler intrinsic, which will probably compile
> down to a single machine instruction.
> 
> By the way: can someone test that the Visual C++ alternate actually
> works? I don't have access to a Windows machine at the moment.

I don't see why it won't work, per documentation on this page:

  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb385231%28v=vs.90%29.aspx

However, I think you will need to make usage of these intrinsics
compiler version dependent.  GCC supports them starting from 3.4,
whereas MSVC seems to support them since Studio 2008, i.e. _MSC_VER =
1500 or higher.

It is also not clear to me what will the MSVC intrinsic do if the
binary ever runs on a CPU that doesn't support SSE4, the MSDN
documentation seems to say that the results are unpredictable,
i.e. that there's no fallback, like GCC has in libgcc.  So perhaps we
should also guard that with a Windows version (assuming that old
machines will only ever run Windows 9x).