[webkit-dev] Time to remove LIKELY and UNLIKELY macros?

[Adam Barth]

Apparently, we set COMPILER(GCC) on clang, so we are at least feeding
this information to the clang compiler.  COMPILER(GCC) is a confusing
name for a macro that also include clang.  :(

Adam


On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 11:11 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
> I don't think so. I wrote a code that can be 10% slower without UNLIKELY
> several weeks ago:
> http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/html/HTMLCollection.cpp#L289
>
> On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:
>>
>> According to
>> <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1851299/is-it-possible-to-tell-the-branch-predictor-how-likely-it-is-to-follow-the-branc>,
>> __builtin_expect (what our LIKELY and UNLIKELY macros expand to [1])
>> doesn't do anything on modern CPUs.  Apparently, these used to be
>> important for PowerPC, but I don't think many folks use WebKit on
>> PowerPC anymore.
>>
>> Should we remove these macros?  I wasted some time today experimenting
>> with them without realizing that they compile to no-ops in clang.
>>
>> Adam
>>
>> [1] http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WTF/wtf/Compiler.h#L188
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>
>