Copy part of array to itself? - c

Question

Basically I'm building a bit reader, slightly before the buffer has been exhausted, I'd like to copy whatever is left of the array to the beginning of the same array, and then zero everything after the copy, and fill the rest with data from the input file.
I'm only trying to use the standard library for portability reasons.
Also, I was profiling my bit reader earlier and Instruments says it was taking like 28 milliseconds to do all of this, is it supposed to take that long?
Code removed

Answer 1

I recommend using memmove for the copy. It has a signature and functionality identical to memcpy, except that it is safe for copying between overlapping regions (which is what you're describing).
For the zero-fill, memset is usually adequate. On the occasion where null pointers aren't represented using an underlying sequence of zeros, for example, you'll need to roll your own using assignment depending upon the type.
For this reason you might want to hide the memmove and memset operations behind abstraction, for example:
#include <string.h>
void copy_int(int *destination, int *source, size_t size) {
memmove(destination, source, size * sizeof *source);
}
void zero_int(int *seq, size_t size) {
memset(seq, 0, size * sizeof *seq);
}
int main(void) {
int array[] = { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 };
size_t index = 2
, size = sizeof array / sizeof *array - index;
copy_int(array, array + index, size);
zero_int(array + size, index);
}
Should either memmove or memset become unsuitable for usecases in the future, it'll then be simple to drop in your own copy/zero loops.
As for your strange profiler results, I suppose it might be possible that you're using some archaic (or grossly underclocked) implementation, or trying to copy huge arrays... Otherwise, 28 milliseconds does seem quite absurd. Nonetheless, your profiler would have surely identified that this memmove and memset isn't a significant bottleneck in an a program that performs actual I/O work, right? The I/O must surely be the bottleneck, right?
If the memmove+memset is indeed a bottleneck, you could try implementing a circular array to avoid the copies. For example, the following code attempts to find needle in the figurative haystack that is input_file...
Otherwise, if the I/O is a bottleneck, there are tweaks that can be applied to reduce that. For example, the following code uses setvbuf to suggest that the underlying implementation attempt to use an underlying buffer to read chunks of the file, despite the code using fgetc to read one character at a time.
void find_match(FILE *input_file, char const *needle, size_t needle_size) {
char input_array[needle_size];
size_t sz = fread(input_array, 1, needle_size, input_file);
if (sz != needle_size) {
// No matches possible
return;
}
setvbuf(input_file, NULL, _IOFBF, BUFSIZ);
unsigned long long pos = 0;
for (;;) {
size_t cursor = pos % needle_size;
int tail_compare = memcmp(input_array, needle + needle_size - cursor, cursor),
head_compare = memcmp(input_array + cursor, needle, needle_size - cursor);
if (head_compare == 0 && tail_compare == 0) {
printf("Match found at offset %llu\n", pos);
}
int c = fgetc(input_file);
if (c == EOF) {
break;
}
input_array[cursor] = c;
pos++;
}
}
Notice how there's no memmove (or zeroing, FWIW) necessary here? We simply operate as though the start of the array is at cursor, the end at cursor - 1 and we wrap by modulo needle_size to ensure there's no overflow/underflow. Then, after each insertion we simply increment the cursor...