[LAD] Optimisations

[Cedric Roux]

On 08/18/2014 07:11 PM, Will Godfrey wrote:
> A long time ago ... in a land far away :)
> I did some assembler programming on the Acorn Archimedes (ARM 2/3) and worked
> out a series of additions and subtractions that would perform very fast
> multiplication of awkward numbers by known amounts.
>
> Is there any point in doing this for C programs, or are modern compilers
> sophisticated enough to do such things themselves?
>
> If anyone is interested *7 is:
> RSB R1, R0, R0, LSL #3
>

gcc 4.8 for ARM seems to give that instruction too with -O2 here for
a simple function that returns *7 of its input argument.

With no optimization:
00000000 <mul7>:
    0:   e52db004        push    {fp}            ; (str fp, [sp, #-4]!)
    4:   e28db000        add     fp, sp, #0
    8:   e24dd00c        sub     sp, sp, #12
    c:   e50b0008        str     r0, [fp, #-8]
   10:   e51b2008        ldr     r2, [fp, #-8]
   14:   e1a03002        mov     r3, r2
   18:   e1a03183        lsl     r3, r3, #3
   1c:   e0623003        rsb     r3, r2, r3
   20:   e1a00003        mov     r0, r3
   24:   e24bd000        sub     sp, fp, #0
   28:   e49db004        pop     {fp}            ; (ldr fp, [sp], #4)
   2c:   e12fff1e        bx      lr