alt Hacker NewsI'm actually surprised that gcc doesn't do this! If there's one thing compilers do well is pattern match on code patterns and replace with more efficient ones; just try pasting things from Hacker's Delight and watch it always canonicalise it to the equivalent, fastest machine code.
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f1shy • yesterday at 4:49 PM
Doing something like that with a pattern is obvious, but also useless, as it will catch very limited cases. The example presented, is known there is a closed form (it’s believed Gauss even discovered it being 6 yo). I’m sure this optimization will catch many other things, so is not trivial at all.
This particular case isn't really due to pattern matching -- it's a result of a generic optimization that evaluates the exit value of an add recurrence using binomial coefficients (even if the recurrence is non-affine). This means it will work even if the contents of the loop get more exotic (e.g. if you perform the sum over x * x * x * x * x instead of x).