23rd May 2016, 1 min read

The surprising cleverness of modern compilers

I wanted to know how a modern C compiler like clang would process the following C code:

#include <stdint.h>
int count(uint64_t x) {
  int v = 0;
  while(x != 0) {
    x &= x - 1;
    v++;
  }
  return v;
}

Can you guess?

popcntq	%rdi, %rax

That is right. A fairly sophisticated C function, one that might puzzle many naive programmers compiles down to a single instruction. (Tested with clang 3.8 using -O3 -march=native on a recent x64 processor.)

What does that mean? It means that C is a high-level language. It is not “down to the metal”. It might have been back when compilers were happy to just translate C into correct binary code… but these days are gone. One consequence of the cleverness of our compilers is that it gets hard to benchmark “algorithms”.

In any case, it is another example of externalized intelligence. Most people, most psychologists, assume that intelligence is what happens in our brain. We test people’s intelligence in room, disconnected from the Internet, with only a pencil. But my tools should get as much or even more credit than my brain for most of my achievements. Left alone in a room with a pencil, I’d be a mediocre programmer, a mediocre scientist. I’d be no programmer at all. And this is good news. It is hard to expand or repair the brain, but we have a knack for building better tools.