4 ms·

Thanks for the insightful reply. I didn't realize array indexing gets converted to pointers in the CPU. I expected the array indexing assembly instructions to b

• saagarjha 5y ago
  This is less about "array indexing" and more about arrays being located at a specific memory address. At some point you're going to have a buffer at address 0x1000 and want to access the 42nd element, and you can't just use a tagged address (e.g. 0x1000000001000) and 42 together without stripping the tag somewhere.
• clord 5y ago
  The compiler can convert small known-size known-offset array accesses into registers or direct static stores and loads, but array indexing is usually on large chunks through a dynamic index via a ref or pointer, which will be via pointer math.
• rayiner 5y ago
  They don’t go unused. Typically the separate address calculation and load will get merged back together during instruction selection is there is an applicable instruction. (Although that may not happen either—the compiler might transform the code to get rid of the array indexing. Keeping around the base pointer takes an additional register.) But on x86 and ARM these instructions are limited. On x86, a load instruction can have a prefix that treats one operand as the array base pointer, and another operand as the index. But the size of the array element is limited to 8 bytes so if your array elements are say 16 byte structs, you can’t use those instructions. As to ARM, I think it doesn’t have an array indexing instruction at all, just base + offset.