الجمعة، 27 ديسمبر 2013

Most efficient and standard-compliant way of reinterpreting int as float

Assume I have guarantees that float is IEEE 754 binary32. Given a bit pattern that corresponds to a valid float, stored in std::uint32_t, how does one reinterpret it as a float in a most efficient standard compliant way?

float reinterpret_as_float(std::uint32_t ui) { return /* apply sorcery to ui */;}

I've got a few ways that I know/suspect/assume have some issues:

Via reinterpret_cast,

float reinterpret_as_float(std::uint32_t ui) { return reinterpret_cast(ui);}

or equvalently

float reinterpret_as_float(std::uint32_t ui) { return *reinterpret_cast(&ui);}

which suffers from aliasing issues.

Via union,

float reinterpret_as_float(std::uint32_t ui) { union { std::uint32_t ui; float f; } u = {ui}; return u.f;}

which is not actually legal, as it is only allowed to read from most recently written to member. Yet, it seems some compilers (gcc) allow this.

Via std::memcpy,

float reinterpret_as_float(std::uint32_t ui) { float f; std::memcpy(&f, &ui, 4); return f;}

which AFAIK is legal, but a function call to copy single word seems wasteful, though it might get optimized away.

Via reinterpret_casting to char* and copying,

float reinterpret_as_float(std::uint32_t ui) { char* uip = reinterpret_cast(&ui); float f; char* fp = reinterpret_cast(&f); for (int i = 0; i < 4; ++i) { fp[i] = uip[i]; } return f;}

which AFAIK is also legal, as char pointers are exempt from aliasing issues and manual byte copying loop saves a possible function call. The loop will most definitely be unrolled, yet 4 possibly separate one-byte loads/stores are worrisome, I have no idea whether this is optimizable to single four byte load/store.

The 4 is the best I've been able to come up with.

Am I correct so far? Is there a better way to do this, particulary one that will guarantee single load/store?


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