Enumerating Enums

Every programming language has its defects; sometimes large, sometimes subtle; often causing irks. One thing that has been bugging me for a while (and many others, as you can see if you use Google) is the impossibility of enumerating enums from basic language constructs. You just can’t. Using the STL (and C++ 2011), however, you can have a somewhat elegant solution.

The solution I propose in this post is robust as it does not depend on the actual values of enums nor on that they can be mapped onto integers. We arrived at this solution (we being me and people on the ##c++ channel on Freenode, especially user “moonchild”) and I think it (almost) solves the problem of enumerating enums.

Yet More __builtins

So last week we saw how to use some of GCC’s built-ins, this week, let’s have a look at how we can create our own, if need be. Say because you need to have access to some instruction and that GCC does not offer the corresponding built-in.

To do so, we’ll use a bit of the C preprocessor and GCC’s inline assembly extension.

More __builtins

Last week we discussed GCC intrinsics a bit. This week, let’s have a look at what kind of speed-ups we can get, and how the use of intrinsics affect code generation.

Sometimes, I do strange things. I mean, my experiments aren’t necessarily self-evident, and sometimes, I need performance from primitives that usually are not bottlenecks—such as computing the GCD. This time, I need to get and in as fast as possible. Let’s have a look at how intrinsics help us.

GCC Built-ins

In the discussion of The Speed of GCD, Daniel Lemire remarked that one could use the compiler-specific intrinsic function __builtin_ctz to get a good speed-up on binary GCD. That remark made me look into all the others intrinsics and built-ins offered by GCC.

Let’s have a look to at least a few of them!