Is it faster to count down than it is to count up?

c performance loops
Bob picture Bob · May 12, 2010 · Viewed 20k times · Source

Our computer science teacher once said that for some reason it is more efficient to count down than to count up. For example if you need to use a FOR loop and the loop index is not used somewhere (like printing a line of N * to the screen) I mean that code like this:

for (i = N; i >= 0; i--)  
  putchar('*');

is better than:

for (i = 0; i < N; i++)  
  putchar('*');

Is it really true? And if so, does anyone know why?

Answer

Norman Ramsey picture Norman Ramsey · May 13, 2010

Is it really true? and if so does anyone know why?

In ancient days, when computers were still chipped out of fused silica by hand, when 8-bit microcontrollers roamed the Earth, and when your teacher was young (or your teacher's teacher was young), there was a common machine instruction called decrement and skip if zero (DSZ). Hotshot assembly programmers used this instruction to implement loops. Later machines got fancier instructions, but there were still quite a few processors on which it was cheaper to compare something with zero than to compare with anything else. (It's true even on some modern RISC machines, like PPC or SPARC, which reserve a whole register to be always zero.)

So, if you rig your loops to compare with zero instead of N, what might happen?

  • You might save a register
  • You might get a compare instruction with a smaller binary encoding
  • If a previous instruction happens to set a flag (likely only on x86 family machines), you might not even need an explicit compare instruction

Are these differences likely to result in any measurable improvement on real programs on a modern out-of-order processor? Highly unlikely. In fact, I'd be impressed if you could show a measurable improvement even on a microbenchmark.

Summary: I smack your teacher upside the head! You shouldn't be learning obsolete pseudo-facts about how to organize loops. You should be learning that the most important thing about loops is to be sure that they terminate, produce correct answers, and are easy to read. I wish your teacher would focus on the important stuff and not mythology.

Related questions

C/C++: is GOTO faster than WHILE and FOR?

I know, that everybody hates GOTO and nobody recommends it. But that's not the point. I just want to know, which code is the fastest: the goto loop int i=3; loop: printf("something"); if(--i) goto loop; the while loop …

Read More
loop tiling. how to choose block size?

I am trying to learn the loop optimization. i found that loop tiling helps in making the array looping faster. i tried with two block of codes given below with and without loop blocking and measure the time taken for …

Read More
Improve INSERT-per-second performance of SQLite

Optimizing SQLite is tricky. Bulk-insert performance of a C application can vary from 85 inserts per second to over 96,000 inserts per second! Background: We are using SQLite as part of a desktop application. We have large amounts of configuration data stored …

Read More