Re: [PATCH 00/11] Improve generic string routines

[Joseph Myers <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Fri, 16 Dec 2016, Richard Henderson wrote:

> I'll note that the comments regarding these tests are in fact out
> of date -- they speak of a number 0x7efefeff which does not appear
> (we use -0x01010101 or 0xfefefeff), and a test misfire which cannot
> actually occur (presumably because we changed algorithms).

Another issue with this comment is bug 5806.  Thus, patches removing that 
comment should include [BZ #5806] in their ChangeLog entries, and once all 
instances of the comment have been removed, that bug should be resolved as 
FIXED with an appropriate milestone set.

Other general observations on the patch series:

* Missing spaces before '(', in lots of places in the patch series.

* Rather than hardcoding unsigned long int as the word type to use, it 
would be better to have another sysdeps header where architectures can 
choose the type to use for this purpose, so that ILP32 configurations with 
64-bit registers can use unsigned long long int instead.  (E.g. there 
aren't many MIPS-specific string functions, so MIPS n32 would benefit from 
using 64-bit integers here.)

* Ondřej Bílka had patches doing similar things in May/June 2015, e.g. 
<https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-05/msg00882.html> 
<https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-05/msg00884.html> 
<https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-05/msg00881.html> 
<https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-06/msg00072.html> (these may 
not be the latest versions of the relevant patches and may not constitute 
a complete set of relevant patches; it's not very clear which of the 
patches in patchwork are or are not superseded).  I haven't compared the 
approaches in detail to see if there is anything useful to take from those 
old patches not covered in the present series.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com