Files
json/single_include/nlohmann
Niels Lohmann 6491563cbb json_view: skip the digits of a fraction 16 bytes at a time (SSE2)
The digits after the decimal point were skipped by skip_digits(), 16 compare-and-branch
steps in a row: about 3.5 instructions per digit, and an exit branch that is
mispredicted when the lengths of the fractions vary. On x86 with SSE2, the
fraction is now skipped by skip_fraction_digits(): 16 bytes are compared at
once and the end of the run is taken from the bit mask, which is about a third
of the instructions for a fraction of 12 digits. The last bytes of the input
are skipped one at a time as before. Where there is no SSE2 (AArch64, other
targets, JSON_NO_SIMD) skip_fraction_digits() is skip_digits(): nothing changes
there. Integer digits keep skip_digits(), whose exit is predictable.

GCC unrolls the loop over the last bytes in every inlined copy of the new
function, which made the parse loop 4 KiB larger and parse() of documents with
hardly any fractions about 4 % slower. For GCC that loop is therefore out of
line (skip_digits_tail()); Clang is faster with it inline.

json_document::parse(), A/B in one binary, 6 code layouts, x86-64 Haswell,
time after / before (GCC 16.2 / Clang 23):

- numbers.json (10,001 floats): 0.715 / 0.680
- canada.json: 0.778 / 0.790
- mesh.json: 0.908 / 0.883
- marine_ik.json: 0.937 / 0.926
- mesh.pretty.json: 0.923 / 0.960

Files with few or no fractions and files with fractions of a fixed length
(20,000 prices with two decimals, 60,000 coordinates with six): between 0.98 and
1.014 on both compilers, except citm_catalog.json with GCC (1.05: the
instruction count is +0.3 %, and that row varies by +-7 % between builds of
unrelated variants on this machine).

New test: fractions of every length from 0 to 40 digits followed by every kind of
byte that ends a number or lies next to the digits in ASCII, in several
positions, and cut in every place near the end of the text, against json::parse()
(the length of the number is part of what is compared), for all option
combinations and with and without a terminating NUL. Checked on x86-64 with GCC 16.2,
Clang 23 and Apple clang under Rosetta, and with a deliberate off-by-one at the 16th byte.

Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me>
2026-10-30 22:17:00 +01:00
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