Re: xor as a lazy comparison

["linux-os \(Dick Johnson\)" <linux-os@analogic.com>]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Clayton Weaver wrote:

> Is not xor (^) typically compiled to a
> one cycle instruction regardless of
> requested optimization level? (May not
> always have been the case on every
> target architecture for != equality
> tests.)
> Clayton Weaver
> cgweav at fastmail dot fm
>

I think the XOR thread was started by somebody as a ruse or
a joke. XOR will always destroy the value of an operand. This
means that it needs to be loaded and perhaps reloaded. A 'TEST'
instruction or a 'CMP' instruction never destroys anything and
only affects the flags. TEST is an AND in which the result is
not saved, only the flags get changed. A CMP is a subtract in
which the result is not saved, only the flags. These are
ix86 instructions, but similar instructions exist for other
CPUs.

All these instructions in their simplest form (using registers)
are two-byte instructions!

Disassembly of section .text:

00000000 <.text>:
    0:	39 c3                	cmp    %eax,%ebx
    2:	31 c3                	xor    %eax,%ebx
    4:	85 d8                	test   %ebx,%eax

Instructions that access memory use more bytes...

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.12 on an i686 machine (5537.79 BogoMips).
Warning : 98.36% of all statistics are fiction.
.
I apologize for the following. I tried to kill it with the above dot :

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