About the only way to know for sure is to test. I'd have to agree that it would take a fairly clever compiler to produce as efficient of output for:
if(n%2) // or (n%2==0) and flip the order
n=n-1
else
n=n+1
as it could for n ^= 1;, but I haven't checked anything similar recently enough to say with any certainty.
As for your second question, I doubt it makes any difference -- an equality comparison is going to end up fast for any of these methods. If you want speed, the main thing to do is avoid having a branch involved at all -- e.g. something like:
if (a == b)
c += d;
can be written as: c += d * (a==b);. Looking at the assembly language, the second will often look a bit messy (with ugly cruft to get the result of the comparison from the flags into a normal register) but still often perform better by avoiding any branches.
Edit: At least the compilers I have handy (gcc & MSVC), do not generate a cmov for the if, but they do generate a sete for the * (a==b). I expanded the code to something testable.
Edit2: Since Potatoswatter brought up another possibility using bit-wise and instead of multiplication, I decided to test that along with the others. Here's the code with that added:
#include <time.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <stdlib.h>
int addif1(int a, int b, int c, int d) {
if (a==b)
c+=d;
return c;
}
int addif2(int a, int b, int c, int d) {
return c += d * (a == b);
}
int addif3(int a, int b, int c, int d) {
return c += d & -(a == b);
}
int main() {
const int iterations = 50000;
int x = rand();
unsigned tot1 = 0;
unsigned tot2 = 0;
unsigned tot3 = 0;
clock_t start1 = clock();
for (int i=0; i<iterations; i++) {
for (int j=0; j<iterations; j++)
tot1 +=addif1(i, j, i, x);
}
clock_t stop1 = clock();
clock_t start2 = clock();
for (int i=0; i<iterations; i++) {
for (int j=0; j<iterations; j++)
tot2 +=addif2(i, j, i, x);
}
clock_t stop2 = clock();
clock_t start3 = clock();
for (int i=0; i<iterations; i++) {
for (int j=0; j<iterations; j++)
tot3 +=addif3(i, j, i, x);
}
clock_t stop3 = clock();
std::cout << "Ignore: " << tot1 << "\n";
std::cout << "Ignore: " << tot2 << "\n";
std::cout << "Ignore: " << tot3 << "\n";
std::cout << "addif1: " << stop1-start1 << "\n";
std::cout << "addif2: " << stop2-start2 << "\n";
std::cout << "addif3: " << stop3-start3 << "\n";
return 0;
}
Now the really interesting part: the results for the third version are quite interesting. For MS VC++, we get roughly what most of us would probably expect:
Ignore: 2682925904
Ignore: 2682925904
Ignore: 2682925904
addif1: 4814
addif2: 3504
addif3: 3021
Using the & instead of the *, gives a definite improvement -- almost as much of an improvement as * gives over if. With gcc the result is quite a bit different though:
Ignore: 2680875904
Ignore: 2680875904
Ignore: 2680875904
addif1: 2901
addif2: 2886
addif3: 7675
In this case, the code using if is much closer to the speed of the code using *, but the code using & is slower than either one -- a lot slower! In case anybody cares, I found this surprising enough that I re-compiled a couple of times with different flags, re-ran a few times with each, and so on and the result was entirely consistent -- the code using & was consistently considerably slower.
The poor result with the third version of the code compiled with gcc gets us back to what I said to start with [and ends this edit]:
As I said to start with, "the only way to know for sure is to test" -- but at least in this limited testing, the multiplication consistently beats the if. There may be some combination of compiler, compiler flags, CPU, data pattern, iteration count, etc., that favors the if over the multiplication -- there's no question that the difference is small enough that a test going the other direction is entirely believable. Nonetheless, I believe that it's a technique worth knowing; for mainstream compilers and CPUs, it seems reasonably effective (though it's certainly more helpful with MSVC than with gcc).
[resumption of edit2:] the result with gcc using & demonstrates the degree to which 1) micro-optimizations can be/are compiler specific, and 2) how much different real-life results can be from expectations.
