Hi,
during some debugging I noticed that GPC generates very hairy code
for the `mod' operator with signed arguments. A closer look revealed
that the code contains a lot of branching on conditions which can be
determined on compile time, and most surprisingly, the value of
X mod Y is recomputed _twice_, if X is negative. (I've attached
a commented assembler dump.)
This may be partially a back-end problem (CSE?), but I feel there's
something wrong in the relevant code in gpc-common.c (build_pascal_binary_op)
as well. `exp1 mod exp2' gets translated into something like
exp2 <= 0 ? error :
exp1 >= 0 ? exp1 mod exp2 :
((-exp1) mod exp2) == 0 ? 0 : exp2 - (-exp1) mod exp2
This arranges that both arguments supplied to the "internal mod"
are non-negative, but this information is not passed on -- the arguments
are still declared as signed types, which apparently makes the back-end
to produce the mess it does. I've done a little test: the following
replacement for `mod', which differs from the built-in one essentially
just by the type-casts to `Cardinal',
inline operator xmod (X, Y: Integer) = Z: Integer;
begin
if Y <= 0 then RuntimeError (714);
if X >= 0 then Z := Cardinal (X) mod Y
else begin
Z := Cardinal (-X) mod Y;
if Z <> 0 then Z := Y - Z
end
end;
indeed generates a better code, it measures about 15% faster for
positive X and more than twice faster for negative X. YMMV.
If this is possible in user code, it should work in the compiler
internals as well :)
The result type of the whole `mod' expression looks dubious too.
IIUIC, `exp1 mod exp2' inherits the type of exp1. Now, the result
of `mod' is guaranteed to be nonnegative and to fit in the type of exp2
(or more precisely, it is in 0 .. High (type of (exp2)) - 1),
whereas it needn't have anything to do with the type of exp1:
consider
var
X, Z: Integer;
Y: LongInt;
begin
X := -8;
Y := High (LongInt);
Z := X mod Y { -> overflow }
end
Or am I missing something?
Emil
(BTW, where is fjf434c.pas?)