When compiling the following code:
int* ptr = nullptr;
delete ptr;
GCC 7.1 on x86_64 generates a delete-operator-related call instruction in the
resulting program with both -O2 and -O3 optimization flags. This is a nonsense
piece of code, indeed, but imagine a class that has an owning raw pointer
(please, don't tell me to use unique_ptr, there are such classes in the real
world). Then, this class needs to call delete in its move assignment operator
and destructor:
class X {
T* ptr_;
public:
X() ptr_(nullptr) { }
X& operator=(X&& rhs) {
delete ptr_;
ptr_ = rhs.ptr_;
rhs.ptr_ = nullptr;
return *this;
}
~X() { delete ptr_; }
...
};
Invoking std::swap with objects of class X then yields deletion of null pointer 3 times (2 times within move assignment operator and once within destructor). Since GCC doesn't optimize out these null-pointer deletions and generate corresponding call instructions, whole swapping has some performance penalty.
I found out that if I change 'delete ptr_;' to 'if (ptr_) delete ptr_;', then
no call instructions are generated. So, I did a benchmark that sorted 100M
randomly-shuffled objects of class X (where T was int) with std::sort. Here are
measured sorting times:
1) 40.8 seconds with plain 'delete ptr_;',
2) 31.5 seconds with 'if (ptr_) delete ptr_;',
3) 31.3 seconds with additional custom swap free function for class X.
This is quite a big performance difference between first two cases. Wouldn't be
nice if g++ was able to optimize out deletion of null pointers? I guess in
cases such as above mentioned one the null pointers can be recognized by static
analysis. (As far as I know omitting delete operator calls is
standard-compliant. Both Clang and Intel compilers did this in my tests.)
Cheers,
Daniel
