On Fri, Feb 20, 2026 at 09:39:38AM -0600, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> I spent some time looking at how clang/gcc compiled the plain-C version on
> various architectures [0], and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that
> at some point in recent history they started automatically converting it to
> special popcount instructions. I suspect that you'd see better results on
> ppc64le if you upgraded the compiler...
If we're willing to rely on this behavior, we could even remove
pg_popcount64_neon() and pg_popcount64_sse42(). We still need to add
"pg_attribute_target("popcnt")" and a corresponding configure check for the
x86 stuff, so it's not as impressive from a code-removal standpoint, but it
at least allows us to remove some uses of intrinsics and inline assembly.
--
nathan