Re: [PATCH v3 3/3] string: vectorize strspn single-accept-char case

Hi Matt,

> The single-accept-character fast path was a byte-at-a-time scalar loop.
> Scan a word at a time instead, using find_ne_all () to locate the first
> byte that differs from the broadcast accept character.  ACCEPT[0] is not
> NUL here, so a NUL byte differs from it and the search for inequality
> also stops at the end of the string.
>
> The word loop compares against the broadcast character directly rather
> than building a mask each iteration, and calls find_ne_all () once at the
> end.  Where find_ne_all () is an exclusive or the compiler already
> generated this, but alpha builds the mask with cmpbge, and the comparison
> halves its loop.
>
> The multi-character case keeps the existing bitmap-table scan.
>
> Checked against strspn () for lengths 0 to 300 at every byte alignment,
> for several accept characters, with the run ended both by NUL and by a
> differing byte.  Run on alpha (EV68CB), powerpc64 big-endian, 32-bit arm,
> aarch64 and x86_64, covering the cmpbge, cmpb, uqsub8 and generic C
> string-fza.h implementations.  The riscv ones were built but not run.
>
> Speedup over the scalar loop it replaces:
>
>   length        8    32   128   512    2K    8K   32K
>   Alpha EV68  1.3x  3.3x  5.2x 11.7x 15.2x 16.4x 16.9x
>   i7-1370P    1.9x  2.8x  5.5x  4.0x  5.2x  6.9x  7.6x
>
> Both are the best of seven timed runs of each implementation, each run
> calibrated to at least 0.3 s so that the millisecond clock granularity on
> alpha does not quantize the result, and built with -falign-functions=64
> so that code placement does not dominate the short lengths.  The i7-1370P
> reaches this code only where SSE4.2 is unavailable, since the generic C
> string-fza.h is what it would use there.
>
> Suggested-by: Wilco Dijkstra <[email protected]>

LGTM. I double checked AArch64: it is equally fast at len 1, 2.6x faster at
size 8 and 4.5x at len 32.

Reviewed-by: Wilco Dijkstra  <[email protected]>

Cheers,
Wilco