Having designed microcoded pipelined processors from gates on up in uni, that's true.
integer cmp x, y often reduces to microcode that effectively runs:
- 3A: sub x, y, dummy_result (att syntax) <-- most likely^
- 2A: sub copy_of_x, y (intel syntax)
- 1A: push x, push y (or y, x), sub, update flags, pop
^ Depends heavily on the microarchitecture, because there's likely all sorts of extra features and ops that can be set in the same microinstruction cycle to implement the macroinstructions.
In signed 2's-complement (mostly everything), zero flag just checks that all result bits to be zero and the less than flag is just the result's MSB (negative result if 1).
Signed and unsigned have their under/overflow issues. Being able to detect that and handle it in code, rather than crashing or silently producing undefined results, can be important, such as safely re-callocing memory (multiply overflow). (There are other issues like pointer/slice index over/underflow too, and these are related problems.)
The issues are usually around whether branch-free code is absolutely necessary or whether predicting branches wrong would incur disastrous pipeline stall/s (greatly depends on the specific use-case, especially inner loops... don't prematurely overoptimize).
I almost feel there needs to be something in-between IR languages like LLVM IR and general-purpose C, that's not assembly but still general-purpose, functional/imperative, static analysis and able to expose math and branching state/options/differences cleanly across a variety platforms without a fugly/verbose syntax.
To make up a pseudoreligion (if it's doesn't look like your preferred Turing-complete language, sorry) at random:
var x, y int32
# ... assign x and y somehow here
begin
x = x +! y # or x +=! y
rescue IntegerOverflowError
# ... int32.max + int32.max => (0xFFFFFFFF + 0xFFFFFFFF) & 0xFFFFFFFF => 0xFFFFFFFE (-2, int32)
rescue IntegerUnderflowError
# ... int32.min + int32.min => (0x7FFFFFFF + 0x7FFFFFFF) & 0xFFFFFFFF => 0xFFFFFFFE (-2, int32)
end
var s, t uint64
# ... assign s and t somehow here
begin
s *=! t
rescue IntegerOverflowError
# ... uint64.max * uint64.max => ... => 1 (1, uint64)
end
In signed 2's compliment architectures (primarily any microprocessor made in the mid 70s or later) that has flags (some RISC based CPUs, like the MIPS, don't have individual flags) will usually have an Overflow flag, (O or V), a Carry flag (C), a Zero flag (Z) and a Sign or Negative flag (S or N---here I'll be using N and V since I have a preference for Motorola CPUs). Yes, internal, a comparison is typically done via a subtraction; the flags are updated, but not the destination register. Now, depending upon how you want to interpret the results, as a signed comparison or unsigned comparison, depends on the flags you check (and the conditional jump (or branch) instructions will do this check for you). The flags that are checked for unsigned comparison are (!f means NOT f, i.e. the flag is not set):
above or equal: !C
above: !C and !Z
below or equal: C or Z
below: C
And the signed comparisons are:
above or equal: N == V
above: N == V and !Z
below or equal: N != V or Z
below: N != V
And, just for completeness, for both signed and unsigned:
Cool. Brings back memories of implementing various jump instructions and carry prediction adders (do adds twice, pick result based on actual carry later) (I recall I had the smallest microprogram in the course class and it used the fewest microcycles by far... everyone hated me. :)
Would it be nice to be able to access the carry in and carry out as "variables", as well as the full imul/idiv if i.e. 32 args -> 64 bit full-precision results without dropping down into assembly. Perhaps it's unreasonable, but it seems there are few limited differences per generic instruction across processors that assuming they are all each "special unique snowflakes" is obviously untrue FUD.
Understanding architecture / assembly comes in handy to replace high-level branching code with branch-free code to avoid pipeline stalls when branch predictions (eg the branch prediction infrastructure) is guessing incorrectly. Also, being able to go down the stack is really helpful because there are most definitely bugs the way down.
integer cmp x, y often reduces to microcode that effectively runs:
^ Depends heavily on the microarchitecture, because there's likely all sorts of extra features and ops that can be set in the same microinstruction cycle to implement the macroinstructions.In signed 2's-complement (mostly everything), zero flag just checks that all result bits to be zero and the less than flag is just the result's MSB (negative result if 1).
Signed and unsigned have their under/overflow issues. Being able to detect that and handle it in code, rather than crashing or silently producing undefined results, can be important, such as safely re-callocing memory (multiply overflow). (There are other issues like pointer/slice index over/underflow too, and these are related problems.)
The issues are usually around whether branch-free code is absolutely necessary or whether predicting branches wrong would incur disastrous pipeline stall/s (greatly depends on the specific use-case, especially inner loops... don't prematurely overoptimize).
I almost feel there needs to be something in-between IR languages like LLVM IR and general-purpose C, that's not assembly but still general-purpose, functional/imperative, static analysis and able to expose math and branching state/options/differences cleanly across a variety platforms without a fugly/verbose syntax.
To make up a pseudoreligion (if it's doesn't look like your preferred Turing-complete language, sorry) at random: