What's it all about, Alfie?

This afternoon I was working on my unsigned 128-bit integer class, UINT128, and realized that I needed to be able to swap byte orders in place, and so I wrote a little method on the class:

  #include <byteswap.h>
 
 
  void UINT128::byteSwap()
  {
    mBlocks[0] = bswap_64(mBlocks[0]);
    mBlocks[1] = bswap_64(mBlocks[1]);
  }

and the thing I love about GCC today is that bswap_64() is a built-in function. Could it be any better? I did a little googling on byte swapping in GCC, and sure enough, there was exactly what I needed. Previously, I had been individually assigning bytes, and while it allowed for optimization, I'm guessing that this is way faster.

I need to remember to google first. It's almost always worth it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 at 11:21 am and is filed under Coding, Open Source Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.