Hi everyone,

This one has been on my backburner for a while.  I spent the last few days writing up some theory on the process, and feel this might be a good optimisation for case blocks whose branches call identically-structured functions, like in the peephole optimizer and the code formatter in Lazarus (it hashes individual words then sends it through a large case block, where a function then determines if it should be made bold or not). I've written up my notes on the Wiki over here:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Case_Compiler_Optimization [1] - I hope it's explained clearly enough, including the requirements.  At the moment I'm not personally working on it because I have to finish my work on pure functions.  Still, how does the proposal look?

When I do write it, the peephole optimizer will be my main test case, as it (currently) has 36 branches and I can test its speed and correctness relatively easily.

Gareth aka. Kit

Links:
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[1] http://wiki.freepascal.org/Case_Compiler_Optimization

P.S. The Wiki topic isn't just for the binary search proposal, and can easily be expanded for proposed and existing paradigms, and become an advanced programming guide. For example, I would be grateful for documentation on how the jump table system works.

Gareth aka. Kit

On Sun 05/08/18 14:38 , "J. Gareth Moreton"
sent:
Hi everyone,

This one has been on my backburner for a while.  I spent the last few days writing up some theory on the process, and feel this might be a good optimisation for case blocks whose branches call identically-structured functions, like in the peephole optimizer and the code formatter in Lazarus (it hashes individual words then sends it through a large case block, where a function then determines if it should be made bold or not). I've written up my notes on the Wiki over here:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Case_Compiler_Optimization [1] - I hope it's explained clearly enough, including the requirements.  At the moment I'm not personally working on it because I have to finish my work on pure functions.  Still, how does the proposal look?

When I do write it, the peephole optimizer will be my main test case, as it (currently) has 36 branches and I can test its speed and correctness relatively easily.

Gareth aka. Kit