Less-Than Vs. Equal-To For Efficiency C/C++

Question

When I've used older APIs, for example, the C sockets API on Unix, I always notice that people favor less-than (<) over equal-to (==) when comparing their bad return values.

int result = send(...);
if (result < 0) { perror("..."); }

In the cases I'm referring to, the return code is only ever positive, 0, or -1 (with errno set to the right value). So why not just check for an error using (result == -1) instead of (result < 0)?

I'm asking because I was wondering if it's done out of habit or if it's more efficient to use less-than? I was thinking about the fact that if you were comparing two uint64_ts and you found the difference in the MSB, you wouldn't have to check the other 7 bytes, etc. I might be reaching with this logic though!

Answer 1

I think that this is neither for habit nor for efficiency. It is safer because you don't rely on a specific return code. Instead, you rely for the error code to be negative. For instance, strcmp function returns "a negative value" when the first string is smaller than the second. On most implementations, it will return -1, but the correct way to handle it is to check for < 0

Answer 2

OK, let's find out. This is GCC 4.6.1 on x86 with -O3, and a is of type int:

if (a < 0):

 movl    4(%esp), %eax
 testl   %eax, %eax
 js      .L4

if (a == -1):

cmpl    $-1, 4(%esp)
je      .L4

Here 4(%esp) is the variable a, and .L4 designates the jump destination of the conditional.

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Update: As @yi_H suggests, now let's compare if (h() < 0) and if (h() == -1), where int h(); is some function. We have:

<       testl   %eax, %eax
<       js      .L4
---
>       cmpl    $-1, %eax
>       je      .L4

Answer 3

This is done for robustness, not efficiency. If you only check for specific return values, such as -1, and the API is later modified to return -1 for one type of error and -2 for a different type of error, the code will no longer behave correctly. In most APIs a negative return value indicates error, so checking that the return value is negative to determine if an error has occurred is the robust solution.