A little warning in GMP.h

[Brian Hurt]

On 25 Sep 2004, Torbjorn Granlund wrote:

> At least in the past GCC didn't always handle that as one would
> wish.  (This is target dependent, the GCC macro BRANCH_COST need
> to be set properly for GCC to do extra computatiuons for avoiding
> branches.)

And in the past eliminating branchs wasn't that big of a problem.  It's 
only been recently that we've started getting CPUs where the branch 
mispredict cost was extreme.

> 
>   The advantage of the branched version is that it doesn't depend 
>   upon the system being twos complement.  And gcc (at least version 3.2.2) 
>   emits branchless code using the sete instruction with just -O2.
> 
> On which platforms?

This was X86/Linux/Redhat 9.0.

>   
>   Another alternative would be:
>       return __gmp_l & (((mp_limb_t) (__gmp_n == 0)) - 1u);
>   
>   Another alternative would be to have a signed mp_limb_t type around.
>   
> We're not going to go through the GMP code just to work around a
> bogus Microsoft compiler warning.  Please use GCC for compiling
> GMP if Microsoft's compiler's bogus warnings bother you.

This isn't a microsoft-ism.  This is a code quality question.

It's not a big deal to me- I don't have to maintain the code.  I just 
thought I'd raise the question.

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Brian