C job interview - casting and comparing

Question

I was confronted with a tricky (IMO) question. I needed to compare two MAC addresses, in the most efficient manner.

The only thought that crossed my mind in that moment

Answer 1

Function memcmp will eventually do the loop itself. So by using it, you would basically just make things less efficient (due to the additional function-call).

Here is an optional solution:

typedef struct
{
    int x;
    short y;
}
MacAddr;

int isEqual(MAC* addr1, MAC* addr2)
{
    return *(MacAddr*)addr1 == *(MacAddr*)addr2;
}

The compiler will most likely convert this code into two comparisons, since the MacAddr structure contains two fields.

Cavity: unless your CPU supports unaligned load/store operations, addr1 and addr2 must be aligned to 4 bytes (i.e., they must be located in addresses that are divisible by 4). Otherwise, a memory access violation will most likely occur when the function is executed.

You may divide the structure into 3 fields of 2 bytes each, or 6 fields of 1 byte each (reducing the alignment restriction to 2 or 1 respectively). But bare in mind that a single comparison in your source code is not necessarily a single comparison in the executable image (i.e., during runtime).

BTW, unaligned load/store operations by themselves may add runtime latency, if they require more "nops" in the CPU pipeline. This is really a matter of CPU architecture, which I doubt they meant to "dig into" that far in your job interview. However, in order to assert that the compiled code does not contain such operations (if indeed they are "expensive"), you could ensure that the variables are always aligned to 8 bytes AND add a #pragma (compiler directive) telling the compiler "not to worry about this".