Re: refactor architecture-specific popcount code

On Tue, Feb 03, 2026 at 12:19:48PM -0500, Greg Burd wrote:
> Thanks for the focus on this area of the code.  I've been looking into
> what to do with popcnt when building Win11/ARM64/MSVC.  I know that when
> _MSC_VER and _M_ARM64 are defined we can make use of the
> __popcnt(unsigned int) and __popcnt64(unsigned __int64) intrinsics which
> have been available since VS 2022 17.11+.  I thought I'd check that combo
> out and it turns out that it is identical to clang/gcc on that platform
> [0].
> 
> I'll wait for your work to land before proposing a patch to add these
> unless it is really easy to fit it and you feel like giving it a go. :)

We should probably just add something like

    #ifdef _MSC_VER
        return __popcnt(word);

for the new inlined versions of pg_popcount{32,64}.  We're already doing
that today for x86-64, and the AArch64-specific versions use intrinsics
that in theory compile to the same thing.  Plus, popcnt is required for
Windows these days.

I'm working on polishing/benchmarking these patches at the moment, so I
will work this change in.  Thanks!

-- 
nathan