This repository was archived by the owner on Apr 5, 2024. It is now read-only.
This repository was archived by the owner on Apr 5, 2024. It is now read-only.
Basic &mut
noalias optimization in unsafe code #24
Open
Description
One optimization we want for sure:
As long as <typeof(value) as Clone>::clone
is known not to panic, this:
unsafe {
let mut ptr = self.buf.ptr();
for i in 0..(self.len) {
ptr::write(ptr, value.clone());
ptr = ptr.offset(1);
self.len += 1;
}
}
Must be optimizable to this:
unsafe {
let mut ptr = self.buf.ptr();
for i in 0..(self.len) {
ptr::write(ptr, value.clone());
ptr = ptr.offset(1);
}
self.len += n;
}
This optimization is important because the latter loop can be further optimized to a memcpy
when value
is Copy
. However, this optimization requires that the memory referenced to by ptr
not alias with self.len
.
We used to do that optimization in older versions of rustc (using an LLVM noalias
attribute, not in trans), but stopped emitting that attribute because LLVM's semantics miss the "is known not to panic" requirement. If we deal with that issue, we would like to apply noalias
again.