[SIMD](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMD) instructions can perform parallel computation in modern CPUs. RapidJSON support Intel's SSE2/SSE4.1 to accelerate whitespace skipping. This improves performance of parsing indent formatted JSON.
[SIMD](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMD) instructions can perform parallel computation in modern CPUs. RapidJSON support Intel's SSE2/SSE4.2 to accelerate whitespace skipping. This improves performance of parsing indent formatted JSON. Define `RAPIDJSON_SSE2` or `RAPIDJSON_SSE42` macro to enable this feature. However, running the executable on a machine without such instruction set support will make it crash.
However, this requires 4 comparisons and a few branching for each character. This was found to be a hot spot.
To accelerate this process, SIMD was applied to compare 16 characters with 4 white spaces for each iteration. Currently RapidJSON only supports SSE2 and SSE4.1 instructions for this. And it is only activated for UTF-8 memory streams, including string stream or *in situ* parsing.
To accelerate this process, SIMD was applied to compare 16 characters with 4 white spaces for each iteration. Currently RapidJSON only supports SSE2 and SSE4.2 instructions for this. And it is only activated for UTF-8 memory streams, including string stream or *in situ* parsing.
To enable this optimization, need to define `RAPIDJSON_SSE2` or `RAPIDJSON_SSE42` before including `rapidjson.h`. Some compilers can detect the setting, as in `perftest.h`:
~~~cpp
// __SSE2__ and __SSE4_2__ are recognized by gcc, clang, and the Intel compiler.
// We use -march=native with gmake to enable -msse2 and -msse4.2, if supported.
#if defined(__SSE4_2__)
# define RAPIDJSON_SSE42
#elif defined(__SSE2__)
# define RAPIDJSON_SSE2
#endif
~~~
Note that, these are compile-time settings. Running the executable on a machine without such instruction set support will make it crash.