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Branchless UTF-8 Encoding

(cceckman.com)
103 points vortex_ape | 3 comments | 17 Jan 25 19:20 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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xeeeeeeeeeeenu ◴[17 Jan 25 20:10 UTC] No.42742731[source]▶
> So on x86_64 processors, we have to branch to say “a 32-bit zero value has 32 leading zeros”.

Not if you're targeting x86-64-v3 or higher. Haswell (Intel) and Piledriver (AMD) introduced the LZCNT instruction that doesn't have this problem.

replies(2): >>42742835 #>>42742859 #
1. pklausler ◴[17 Jan 25 20:21 UTC] No.42742859[source]▶
Easy to count leading zeroes in a branch-free manner without a hardware instruction using a conditional move and a de Bruijn sequence; see https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/flang/include... .
replies(1): >>42744263 #
2. hinkley ◴[17 Jan 25 23:17 UTC] No.42744263[source]▶

    x |= x >> 1;
    x |= x >> 2;
    x |= x >> 4;
    x |= x >> 8;
    x |= x >> 16;
    x |= x >> 32;
Isn't there another way to do this without so many data races?

I feel like this should be

   x |= x >> 1 | x >> ??? ...
replies(1): >>42744484 #
3. gpderetta ◴[17 Jan 25 23:53 UTC] No.42744484[source]▶
By data races I assume you actually mean data dependencies?