Why Builtin Dict `ht_keyindex` use & rather than %?

General Usage
1

I was reading the implementation of Dict, I don’t know why ht_keyindex use (index & (sz-1)) + 1 rather than index % sz + 1, won’t the compiler optimize it? I use BenchmarkTools to check whether the previous implementation is faster, and it is a little bit faster indeed. But I would like to know why this is faster.

I tested this on Julia v0.6.3.

2

The compiler can only optimize it if it could prove they are equivalent. Since sz is an arbitrary number, the compiler can’t know that it’s always actually a power-of-two number.

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