6 May
2017
6 May
'17
9:53 p.m.
On Sat, May 06, 2017 at 03:51:24PM +0000, Michael Kj??rling wrote:
On 6 May 2017 08:24 -0700, from lm(a)mcvoy.com (Larry
McVoy):
I disagree; loop unrolling and jumping to the beginning of some
instruction inside that unrolled loop is not at all the same thing as
jumping _into the middle of a machine language instruction_.
That's fine, I feel no need to argue about it. Seemed similar to me but
I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed :)
I would
absolutely not say that doing something like that is standard
practice in modern programming. Even in microcontrollers, where
program and data memory can be scarce even today, I would argue that
the costs would not outweigh the benefits by a long shot.
It strikes as being similar to Duff's device (1). Which is a niche thing
but I still use that from time to time. Not to save memory, just because
as a C programmer it seems pretty natural to do it.
--lm
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff's_device