fastmod
A header file for fast 32-bit division remainders on 64-bit hardware.
How fast? Faster than your compiler can do it!
Compilers cleverly replace divisions by multiplications and shifts, if the divisor is known at compile time. In a hashing benchmark, our simple C code can beat state-of-the-art compilers (e.g., LLVM clang, GNU GCC) on a recent Intel processor (Skylake).
Further reading:
- Faster Remainder by Direct Computation: Applications to Compilers and Software Libraries, Software: Practice and Experience 49 (6), 2019.
Usage
We support all major compilers (LLVM's clang, GNU GCC, Visual Studio). Users of Visual Studio need to compile to a 64-bit binary, typically by selecting x64 in the build settings.
It is a header-only library but we have unit tests. Assuming a Linux/macOS setting:
make
./unit
The tests are exhaustive and take some time.
Code samples
In C, you can use the header as follows.
#include "fastmod.h"
// unsigned...
uint32_t d = ... ; // divisor, should be non-zero
uint64_t M = computeM_u32(d); // do once
fastmod_u32(a,M,d);// is a % d for all 32-bit unsigned values a.
fastdiv_u32(a,M);// is a / d for all 32-bit unsigned values a.
is_divisible(a,M);// tells you if a is divisible by d
// signed...
int32_t d = ... ; // should be non-zero and between [-2147483647,2147483647]
int32_t positive_d = d < 0 ? -d : d; // absolute value
uint64_t M = computeM_s32(d); // do once
fastmod_s32(a,M,positive_d);// is a % d for all 32-bit a
fastdiv_s32(a,M,d);// is a / d for all 32-bit a
In C++, it is much the same except that every function is in the fastmod namespace so you need to prefix the calls with fastmod:: (e.g., fastmod::is_divisible).
Go version
- There is a Go version of this library: https://github.com/bmkessler/fastdiv
(Speculative work) 64-bit benchmark
It is an open problem to derive 64-bit divisions that are faster than what the compiler can produce for constant divisors.
For comparisons to native % and / operations, as well as bitmasks, we have provided a benchmark with 64-bit div/mod. You can compile these benchmarks with make benchmark.
These require C++11. It is not currently supported under Visual Studio.