Double to int conversion behind the scene?

Question

I am just curious to know what happens behind the scene to convert a double to int, say int(5666.1) ? Is that going to be more expensive than a static_cast of a child class to parent? Since the representation of the int and double are fundamentally different is there going to be temporaries created during the process and expensive too.

Answer 1

Any CPU with native floating point will have an instruction to convert floating-point to integer data. That operation can take from a few cycles to many. Usually there are separate CPU registers for FP and integers, so you also have to subsequently move the integer to an integer register before you can use it. That may be another operation, possibly expensive. See your processor manual.

PowerPC notably does not include an instruction to move an integer in an FP register to an integer register. There has to be a store from FP to memory and load to integer. You could therefore say that a temporary variable is created.

In the case of no hardware FP support, the number has to be decoded. IEEE FP format is:

sign | exponent + bias | mantissa

To convert, you have to do something like

// Single-precision format values:
int const mantissa_bits = 23; // 52 for double.
int const exponent_bits = 8; // 11 for double.
int const exponent_bias = 127; // 1023 for double.

std::int32_t ieee;
std::memcpy( & ieee, & float_value, sizeof (std::int32_t) );
std::int32_t mantissa = ieee & (1 << mantissa_bits)-1 | 1 << mantissa_bits;
int exponent = ( ieee >> mantissa_bits & (1 << exponent_bits)-1 )
             - ( exponent_bias + mantissa_bits );
if ( exponent <= -32 ) {
    mantissa = 0;
} else if ( exponent < 0 ) {
    mantissa >>= - exponent;
} else if ( exponent + mantissa_bits + 1 >= 32 ) {
    overflow();
} else {
    mantissa <<= exponent;
}
if ( ieee < 0 ) mantissa = - mantissa;
return mantissa;

I.e., a few bit unpacking instructions and a shift.

Answer 2

There's invariably a dedicated FPU instruction that gets the job done, cvttsd2si if the code generator uses the Intel SSE2 instruction set. That's fast, but not as fast as a static cast. That doesn't usually require any code at all.