[fpc-pascal] Where is the best place to declare an array?

[Jonas Maebe]

On 06 May 2010, at 23:28, Werner Van Belle wrote:

> In 'human' (haha) terms:
> 
> - global variable access: write data into 'ds+constant'
> - local variables: write data into 'ss+bp+constant'.
> 
> Since the latter involves a term more I assume it is bound to take more
> time.

That was true in the days of the 8086 (the former took 6 cycles while the latter took 9 cycles). On the i386 and i486, both expressions were already calculated in a single cycle; they only suffered an extra single cycle penalty in case the address expression used an index (your example only contains a base). On the Pentium, address expressions containing an index were also evaluated in a single cycle. On today's deeply pipelined processors it is extremely unlikely that there is any difference whatsoever in the number of steps used to evaluate both address expressions (even if the time required by the i386/i386/Pentium wasn't documented).

If you wish to read the outdated details of the old Intel processors:
* http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~inf1018/material/intel.txt (search for "8088/8086  Effective Address (EA) Calculation")
* http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article205.asp (search for "Choice of Index Versus Base Register")

Moreover, the first instruction takes up 10 bytes while the second one takes up only 7 bytes, which means that the "global array instruction" takes up more space in the icache (and that's something which actually /is/ very bad from a performance point-of-view). Combined with how global variables require indirection (as in "an extra memory load instruction") on RISC processors and if position-independent code is used (except under some specific circumstances on the x86-64), often slow down program startup (when the dynamic linker has to relocate them), and often behave very badly in terms of data locality (they are often surrounded by unrelated data, as opposed to local variables where the surrounding data will probably also be used by the same function), in general my bias would be much more against than in favour of global variables from a speed perspective (and when not talking about arrays, an additional advantage of local variables is that they often can be kept in registers rather than in memory, which is seldom the case for global variables).


Jonas