On the 0x5AA day of Apache Harmony Ian Rogers wrote:
> 2009/5/6 Egor Pasko <egor.pa...@gmail.com>:
>>> Thanks Egor :-) I don't know if 3 dependent integer operations will
>>> run faster than two compare and branches as the branches may be
>>> speculated over. Unfortunately for Jikes RVM we frequently sort arrays
>>> containing just 0.0 and 1.0 meaning the performance of 0.0 compares
>>> hurts us.
>>
>> Ian, do you really need zeroes in the right order? I'd be really
>> surprized if you do :) If there are really a lot of +-0.0s .. isn't it
>> faster to count the number of zeroes prior to sorting?
>
> Agreed, I'm being lazy in not writing our own sort :-)
>
>>> Other issues if we're wringing performance:
>>>
>>> - could Float.equals be improved in a similar manner to
>>> Float.compareTo in particular avoiding using floatToIntBits and its
>>> inherent NaN tests,ie:
>>>
>>> public boolean equals(Object object) {
>>> /* removed as this case seems generally unlikely and is
>>> covered by the case below
>>> if (object == this) {
>>> return true;
>>> } else */
By the way, I am not eager to disable this (speculative)
optimization. Can you prove that your new version behaves better on
common benchmarks?
>>> if (object instanceof Float) {
>>> float otherValue = ((Float) object).value;
>>> return (floatToRawIntBits(value) ==
>>> floatToRawIntBits(otherValue)) ||
>>> (isNaN(value) && isNaN(otherValue));
>>> } else {
>>> return false;
>>> }
>>> }
>>
>> is compareTo not suitable here because of the same reasons as in
>> example below? Or am I missing something?
>
> The current equals code doesn't use compareTo and the < and > cases
> aren't that interesting, the code above is really just putting the
> same optimizations discussed for compareTo into place for equals.
OK, cool.
not sure I understand the reason to change floatToIntBits() to
floatToRawIntBits() in the above and comparing with NaN
explicitly. floatToIntBits() replaes the isNaN() checking at a low
cost. Most of the time is eaten in JNI transition, I believe.
>>> - is it worth specializing the code in Arrays.lessThan to something
>>> like (I don't think Jikes RVM can inline compareTo and achieve an
>>> equivalent transformation and it saves quite a number of compares):
>>>
>>> private static boolean lessThan(float float1, float float2) {
>>> // Non-zero, non-NaN checking.
>>> if (float2 > float1) {
>>> return true;
>>> }
>>> if (float1 >= float2 && 0.0f != float1) {
>>> return false;
>>> }
>>> // NaNs are equal to other NaNs and larger than any other float
>>> if (isNaN(float1)) {
>>> return false;
>>> } else if (isNaN(float2)) {
>>> return true;
>>> }
>>> // Deal with +0.0 and -0.0
>>> int f1 = floatToRawIntBits(float1);
>>> int f2 = floatToRawIntBits(float2);
>>> return f1 < f2;
>>> }
>>
>> good idea, I'll do that if nobody objects :)
>
> Cheers,
> Ian
>
--
Egor Pasko
