[gambit-list] Getting rid of the -fwrapv flag in gcc

Bradley Lucier lucier at math.purdue.edu
Sun Apr 15 18:39:22 EDT 2007


Marc:

I've been thinking about how to get the C code generated by gsc to  
conform to the ISO C standard.  Beyond being just a "good thing",  
this would allow us to get rid of the -fwrapv and -fno-strict- 
aliasing flags in gcc, which would also enable some further compiler  
optimizations.  (Well, getting rid of -fwrapv enables some  
optimizations and disables others.)

I think the only places in the gambit back-end where we assume that  
signed arithmetic wraps on overflow are in the macros FIXADDP,  
FIXMULP, and FIXSUBP in gambit.h.  I'm no expert on signed vs.  
unsigned arithmetic in C, but I think that simply casting the  
arguments of the possibly overflowing operations to unsigned, and  
then casting the result back to signed, will, in the end, give us the  
same result but will be standard-conforming.

So I offer this (lightly tested, but it did pass "make check") patch  
for gambit.h that does precisely this. This should allow us to omit  
the -fwrapv flag for gcc.  I don't have any performance figures for  
gsc compiled without -fwrapv, but the binary is a bit smaller:

[brad:~/programs/gambc-4.0b22] lucier% ll gsc/gsc gsc-comp
-rwxr-xr-x   1 lucier  lucier  5544476 Apr  6 19:11 gsc-comp*
-rwxr-xr-x   1 lucier  lucier  5540296 Apr 15 17:58 gsc/gsc*

The patch also has an extra guard to limit the use of  
__builtin_expect to versions of gcc >= 3.0.

Brad

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