GCC still keeps empty loops? (was: [patch 4/21] fix ARCH_HAS_PREFETCH)

From: Jamie Lokier (lk@tantalophile.demon.co.uk)
Date: Sun Aug 11 2002 - 15:07:18 EST


Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I thought that special case was removed long ago, because it is untenable
> in C++ etc (where such empty loops happen due to various abstraction
> issues, and not optimizing them away is just silly).
>
> But testing shows that you're right at least for 2.95 and 2.96. Argh

Unbelievably, 3.1 doesn't remove empty loops either.
I think there's a case for a compiler flag, `-fremove-empty-loops'.

Empty loop delays aren't portable acrosss compilers in general. If you
_really_ want an empty loop that must always work with GCC, it's easy
enough to write:

        for (i = 0; i < 100000; i++)
                __asm__ __volatile__ ("");

-- Jamie
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