Re: g++ 4.3, troubles with C++ indexing idioms

["Richard Guenther" <richard dot guenther at gmail dot com>]

On 7/19/07, tbp <tbptbp@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have that usual heavy duty 3 fp components class that needs to be
> reasonably efficient and takes this form for g++
> struct vec_t {
>         float x,y,z;
>         const float &operator()(const uint_t i) const { return *(&x + i); }
>         float &operator()(const uint_t i) { return *(&x + i); } // <-- guilty
>         [snip ctors, operators & related cruft]
> };
>
> I use this notation because g++ does silly things with straight arrays
> (and C++ gets in the way), doesn't like
> union vec_t {
>         struct { float x,y,z; };
>         float f[3];
>         const float &operator()(const uint_t i) const { return m[i]; }
>         float &operator()(const uint_t i) { return m[i]; }
> };
> much either, and seems to enjoy the first form (+ ctors with
> initializer lists) much. So far, so good.
>
> Alas, somewhere between gcc-4.3-20070608 (ok) and gcc-4.3-20070707
> (not ok ever since), the non const indexing started to trigger bogus
> codegen with some skipped stores on x86-64, but of course only in
> convoluted situations. So, i can't produce a simple testcase. I can
> kludge around either by:
> . marking it __attribute__((noinline))
> . turning it into a "set" operation doing a "std::memcpy(&x + i, &f,
> sizeof(float))"
> . annoying the optimizer with the entertaining
> union vec_t {
>         struct { float x,y,z; };
>         float f[3];
>         const float &operator()(const uint_t i) const { return *(&x + i); }
>         float &operator()(const uint_t i) { return *(&x + i); }
> };
>
> At this point i'd need some guidance from compiler developers because
> the compiler itself provides none (no warning whatsoever in any of
> those variations) and what i thought was acceptable apparently isn't
> anymore.
> What kind of idiom am i supposed to write such thing in to get back
> efficient and correct code?

Well, I always used the array variant, but you should be able to do

struct vec {
...
 union {
    struct { float x, y, z; } a;
    float x[3] b;
 } u;
}

if you need to (why does the array form not work for you?)

Richard.