mozilla/rust — pull request #11280 by c-a (2014-01-02 22:46:47+00:00)
Title: Always inline byteswap functions

After writing some benchmarks for ebml::reader::vuint_at() I noticed that LLVM doesn't seem to inline the from_be32 function even though it only does a call to the bswap32 intrinsic in the x86_64 case. Marking the functions with #[inline(always)] fixes that and seems to me a reasonable thing to do. I got the following measurements in my vuint_at() benchmarks:

# Before
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_A_aligned ... bench: 1075 ns/iter (+/- 58)
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_A_unaligned ... bench: 1073 ns/iter (+/- 5)
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_D_aligned ... bench: 1150 ns/iter (+/- 5)
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_D_unaligned ... bench: 1151 ns/iter (+/- 6)

# Inline from_be32
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_A_aligned ... bench: 769 ns/iter (+/- 9)
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_A_unaligned ... bench: 795 ns/iter (+/- 6)
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_D_aligned ... bench: 758 ns/iter (+/- 8)
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_D_unaligned ... bench: 759 ns/iter (+/- 8)

# Using vuint_at_slow()
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_A_aligned ... bench: 646 ns/iter (+/- 7)
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_A_unaligned ... bench: 645 ns/iter (+/- 3)
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_D_aligned ... bench: 907 ns/iter (+/- 4)
test ebml::bench::vuint_at_D_unaligned ... bench: 1085 ns/iter (+/- 16)

As expected inlining from_be32() gave a considerable speedup.
I also tried how the "slow" version fared against the optimized version and noticed that it's
actually a bit faster for small A class integers (using only two bytes) but slower for big D class integers (using four bytes)