For reference : https://run.dlang.io/is/FULu3x (select LDC, click ASM and ctrl+f and type main to find the relevant code)
(compiler options are -O -mcpu=native -enable-no-infs-fp-math -enable-unsafe-fp-math -enable-ipra -tailcallopt -release)

When performing a[] *op*= b[] or foreach(i, aa; a){a[i] -= b[i]} operations, LDC generates slower code than it should.

The generated code appears to always be a switch loop which operates on packets of 32, 4 or 1 values(the size of the packets varies program to program) and jumps to the appropriate case depending on the remaining number of values to operate on.
The code for the 32 and 1-sized packets is ok in my program, but the middle in-between size(4 here, although i've seen it do it with 8) always uses unrolled v*op*ss instead of the packed versions(VSUBPS here).
In my testing, naively modifying the code with the appropriate SIMD equivalent through a debugger and jumping to the end of the switch case causes observable performance gain(5-10% total program time in the worst case where the array's .length is < 32)

I'm not sure if this is related, but i've also seen code output where the faulty case kept doing redundant register loads as if it was the first iteration.
An example:

mov rsi, [rsp+30]
mov rdi, [rsp+78]
mov rsi, [rsi+138]
vmovss xmm0, [rdi+rdx*4]
vsubss xmm0, xmm0, [rsi+rdx*4]
vmovss [rdi+rdx*4], xmm0
;//repeat this for 3 more iterations, the pointer loads are the exact sames while the floats use an +(unroll_i*float.sizeof) offset

So my question is how can i get LDC/LLVM to generate the proper code?

Thanks.

On Monday, 21 June 2021 at 01:12:33 UTC, z wrote:

It looks like both loop unrolling and auto-vectorization expect a higher iteration/element count by default, and LDC currently doesn't have a way to fine-tune these parameters on a per-function/loop basis (e.g., via pragmas), only global LLVM cmdline options.

@restrict doesn't help much either here to tell the optimizer the opaque slices don't overlap (opaque because the GC allocation is an opaque druntime function call).

Using vector types explicitly improves things but imposes restrictions on lengths and alignment.

See https://d.godbolt.org/z/r746o3Ya5 for boilerplate-free assembly.