What is the fastest portable way to copy an array in C++

Question

This question has been bothering me for some time. The possibilities I am considering are

1. memcpy
2. std::copy
3. cblas_dcopy

Does anyone have any clue on what the pros and cons are with these three? Other suggestions are also welcome.

Answer 1

In C++ you should use std::copy by default unless you have good reasons to do otherwise. The reason is that C++ classes define their own copy semantics via the copy constructor and copy assignment operator, and of the operations listed, only std::copy respects those conventions.

memcpy() uses raw, byte-wise copy of data (though likely heavily optimized for cache line size, etc.), and ignores C++ copy semantics (it's a C function, after all...).

cblas_dcopy() is a specialized function for use in linear algebra routines using double precision floating point values. It likely excels at that, but shouldn't be considered general purpose.

If your data is "simple" POD type struct data or raw fundamental type data, memcpy will likely be as fast as you can get. Just as likely, std::copy will be optimized to use memcpy in these situations, so you'll never know the difference.

In short, use std::copy().

Answer 2

Use std::copy unless profiling shows you a needed benefit in doing otherwise. It honours the C++ object encapsulation, invoking copy constructors and assignment operators, and the implementation could include other inline optimisations. That's more maintainable if the types being copied are changed from something trivially copyable to something not.

As PeterCordes comments below, modern compilers such as GCC and clang analyse memcpy() requests internally and typically avoid an out-of-line function call, and even before that some systems had memcpy() macros that inlined copies below a certain size threshold.

FWIW / on the old Linux box I have handy (in 2010), GCC doesn't do any spectacular optimisations, but bits/type_traits.h does allow the program to easily specify whether std::copy should fall through to memcpy() (see code below), so there's no reason to avoid using std::copy() in favour of memcpy() directly.

 * Copyright (c) 1997
 * Silicon Graphics Computer Systems, Inc.
 *
 * Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this software
 * and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee,
 * provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and            
 * that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear            
 * in supporting documentation.  Silicon Graphics makes no                      
 * representations about the suitability of this software for any               
 * purpose.  It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.        
 ...                                                                            
                                                                            
/*                                                                              
This header file provides a framework for allowing compile time dispatch        
based on type attributes. This is useful when writing template code.            
For example, when making a copy of an array of an unknown type, it helps        
to know if the type has a trivial copy constructor or not, to help decide       
if a memcpy can be used.

The class template __type_traits provides a series of typedefs each of
which is either __true_type or __false_type. The argument to
__type_traits can be any type. The typedefs within this template will
attain their correct values by one of these means:
    1. The general instantiation contain conservative values which work
       for all types.
    2. Specializations may be declared to make distinctions between types.
    3. Some compilers (such as the Silicon Graphics N32 and N64 compilers)
       will automatically provide the appropriate specializations for all
       types.

EXAMPLE:

//Copy an array of elements which have non-trivial copy constructors
template <class _Tp> void
  copy(_Tp* __source,_Tp* __destination,int __n,__false_type);
//Copy an array of elements which have trivial copy constructors. Use memcpy.
template <class _Tp> void
  copy(_Tp* __source,_Tp* __destination,int __n,__true_type);

//Copy an array of any type by using the most efficient copy mechanism
template <class _Tp> inline void copy(_Tp* __source,_Tp* __destination,int __n) {
   copy(__source,__destination,__n,
        typename __type_traits<_Tp>::has_trivial_copy_constructor());
}
*/