• Michael T. Jones's avatar
    big.nat: Improved speed of nat-to-string conversion · d5c45c54
    Michael T. Jones authored
    Three optimizations: First, special-case power of two bases
    that partion a Word(), bases 2, 4, 16, and 256. These can
    be moved directly from internal Word() storage to the output
    without multiprecision operations. Next, same approach for
    the other power-of-two bases, 8, 32, 64, and 128. These
    don't fill a Word() evenly, so special handling is needed
    for those cases where input spans the high-bits of one Word
    and the low bis of the next one.  Finally, implement the
    general case for others bases in 2 <= base <= 256 using
    superbases, the largest power of base representable in a
    Word(). For base ten, this is 9 digits and a superbase of
    10^9 for 32-bit Words and 19 digits and 10^19 for 64-bit
    compiles. This way we do just 1/9th or 1/19th of the expensive
    multiprecision divisions, unpacking superdigits using fast
    native machine arithmetic. The resulting code runs 7x to
    800x the speed of the previous approach, depending on the
    length of the number to be converted--longer is relatively
    faster.
    
    Also, extended the tests and benchmarks for string to nat
    (scan()) and nat to string (string()) functions. A further
    enhancement awaits the next CL to make general cases about
    7x faster for long cases.
    
    R=gri
    CC=golang-dev
    https://golang.org/cl/4595041
    d5c45c54
nat_test.go 19.3 KB