[New-bugs-announce] [issue28126] Py_MEMCPY: Use memcpy on Windows?

[Christian Heimes]

New submission from Christian Heimes:

Py_MEMCPY() has a special case for small blocks on Windows to work around an ancient performance issue in MSVC. Can we safely assume that recent MSVC properly optimize memcpy()? See #28055

/* Py_MEMCPY can be used instead of memcpy in cases where the copied blocks
 * are often very short.  While most platforms have highly optimized code for
 * large transfers, the setup costs for memcpy are often quite high.  MEMCPY
 * solves this by doing short copies "in line".
 */

#if defined(_MSC_VER)
#define Py_MEMCPY(target, source, length) do {                          \
        size_t i_, n_ = (length);                                       \
        char *t_ = (void*) (target);                                    \
        const char *s_ = (void*) (source);                              \
        if (n_ >= 16)                                                   \
            memcpy(t_, s_, n_);                                         \
        else                                                            \
            for (i_ = 0; i_ < n_; i_++)                                 \
                t_[i_] = s_[i_];                                        \
    } while (0)
#else
#define Py_MEMCPY memcpy
#endif

----------
components: Windows
messages: 276262
nosy: christian.heimes, haypo, paul.moore, steve.dower, tim.golden, zach.ware
priority: normal
severity: normal
stage: needs patch
status: open
title: Py_MEMCPY: Use memcpy on Windows?
type: performance
versions: Python 3.6, Python 3.7

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue28126>
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