Most performant way to subtract one array from another

Question

I have the following code which is the bottleneck in one part of my application. All I do is subtract on Array from another. Both of these arrays have more around 100000 element

Answer 1

I'm not assembly expert but I think the following are near optimal if you don't take into account SIMD instructions or parallel processing, the later can be easily accomplished by passing portions of the array to the function.

like
Thread1: SubArray(ar1[0], ar2[0], 50);
Thread2: SubArray(ar1[50], ar2[50], 50);

procedure SubArray(var Array1, Array2; const Length: Integer);
var
  ap1, ap2 : PInteger;
  i : Integer;
begin
  ap1 := @Array1;
  ap2 := @Array2;
  i := Length;
  while i > 0 do
  begin
    ap1^ := ap1^ - ap2^;
    Inc(ap1);
    Inc(ap2);
    Dec(i);
  end;
end;

// similar assembly version
procedure SubArrayEx(var Array1, Array2; const Length: Integer);
asm
  // eax = @Array1
  // edx = @Array2
  // ecx = Length
  // esi = temp register for array2^
  push esi
  cmp ecx, 0
  jle @Exit
  @Loop:
  mov esi, [edx]
  sub [eax], esi
  add eax, 4
  add edx, 4
  dec ecx
  jnz @Loop
  @Exit:
  pop esi
end;


procedure Test();
var
  a1, a2 : array of Integer;
  i : Integer;
begin
  SetLength(a1, 3);
  a1[0] := 3;
  a1[1] := 1;
  a1[2] := 2;
  SetLength(a2, 3);
  a2[0] := 4;
  a2[1] := 21;
  a2[2] := 2;
  SubArray(a1[0], a2[0], Length(a1));

  for i := 0 to Length(a1) - 1 do
    Writeln(a1[i]);

  Readln;
end;