cmd/compile: unroll comparisons to short constant strings

Unroll s == "ab" to

len(s) == 2 && s[0] == 'a' && s[1] == 'b'

This generates faster and shorter code
by avoiding a runtime call.
Do something similar for !=.

The cutoff length is 6. This was chosen empirically
by examining binary sizes on arm, arm64, 386, and amd64
using the SSA backend.

For all architectures examined, 4, 5, and 6 were
the ideal cutoff, with identical binary sizes.

The distribution of constant string equality sizes
during 'go build -a std' is:

 40.81%   622 len 0
 14.11%   215 len 4
  9.45%   144 len 1
  7.81%   119 len 3
  7.48%   114 len 5
  5.12%    78 len 7
  4.13%    63 len 2
  3.54%    54 len 8
  2.69%    41 len 6
  1.18%    18 len 10
  0.85%    13 len 9
  0.66%    10 len 14
  0.59%     9 len 17
  0.46%     7 len 11
  0.26%     4 len 12
  0.20%     3 len 19
  0.13%     2 len 13
  0.13%     2 len 15
  0.13%     2 len 16
  0.07%     1 len 20
  0.07%     1 len 23
  0.07%     1 len 33
  0.07%     1 len 36

A cutoff of length 6 covers most of the cases.

Benchmarks on amd64 comparing a string to a constant of length 3:

Cmp/1same-8           4.78ns ± 6%  0.94ns ± 9%  -80.26%  (p=0.000 n=20+20)
Cmp/1diffbytes-8      6.43ns ± 6%  0.96ns ±11%  -85.13%  (p=0.000 n=20+20)
Cmp/3same-8           4.71ns ± 5%  1.28ns ± 5%  -72.90%  (p=0.000 n=20+20)
Cmp/3difffirstbyte-8  6.33ns ± 7%  1.27ns ± 7%  -79.90%  (p=0.000 n=20+20)
Cmp/3difflastbyte-8   6.34ns ± 8%  1.26ns ± 9%  -80.13%  (p=0.000 n=20+20)

The change to the prove test preserves the
existing intent of the test. When the string was
short, there was a new "proved in bounds" report
that referred to individual byte comparisons.

Change-Id: I593ac303b0d11f275672090c5c786ea0c6b8da13
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/26758
Run-TryBot: Josh Bleecher Snyder <josharian@gmail.com>
TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Brad Fitzpatrick <bradfitz@golang.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/test/prove.go b/test/prove.go
index 8bcc9ae614..65eed745cb 100644
--- a/test/prove.go
+++ b/test/prove.go
@@ -250,7 +250,7 @@ func f9(a, b bool) int {
 
 func f10(a string) int {
 	n := len(a)
-	if a[:n>>1] == "aaa" {
+	if a[:n>>1] == "aaaaaaaaaaaaaa" {
 		return 0
 	}
 	return 1