Question

Say I had this snippet of code:

#include <cmath>

// ...

float f = rand();
std::cout << sin(f) << " " << sin(f);

As sin(f) is a well defined function there is an easy optimisation:

float f = rand();
float sin_f = sin(f);
std::cout << sin_f << " " << sin_f;

Is this an optimisation that it’s reasonable to expect a modern C++ compiler to do by itself? Or is there no way for the compiler to determine that sin(f) should always return the same value for an equal value of f?

Answer 1

Using g++ built with default optimization flags:

float f = rand();
40117e: e8 75 01 00 00          call   4012f8 <_rand>
401183: 89 44 24 1c             mov    %eax,0x1c(%esp)
401187: db 44 24 1c             fildl  0x1c(%esp)
40118b: d9 5c 24 2c             fstps  0x2c(%esp)
std::cout << sin(f) << " " << sin(f);
40118f: d9 44 24 2c             flds   0x2c(%esp)
401193: dd 1c 24                fstpl  (%esp)
401196: e8 65 01 00 00          call   401300 <_sin>  <----- 1st call
40119b: dd 5c 24 10             fstpl  0x10(%esp)
40119f: d9 44 24 2c             flds   0x2c(%esp)
4011a3: dd 1c 24                fstpl  (%esp)
4011a6: e8 55 01 00 00          call   401300 <_sin>  <----- 2nd call
4011ab: dd 5c 24 04             fstpl  0x4(%esp)
4011af: c7 04 24 e8 60 40 00    movl   $0x4060e8,(%esp)

Built with -O2:

float f = rand();
4011af: e8 24 01 00 00          call   4012d8 <_rand>
4011b4: 89 44 24 1c             mov    %eax,0x1c(%esp)
4011b8: db 44 24 1c             fildl  0x1c(%esp)
std::cout << sin(f) << " " << sin(f);
4011bc: dd 1c 24                fstpl  (%esp)
4011bf: e8 1c 01 00 00          call   4012e0 <_sin>  <----- 1 call

From this we can see that without optimizations the compiler uses 2 calls and just 1 with optimizations, empirically I guess, we can say the compiler does optimize the call.