`bytes.Equal` shouldn't allocate

[dgryski]

TinyGo uses the bytes package from upstream Go.

// Equal reports whether a and b
// are the same length and contain the same bytes.
// A nil argument is equivalent to an empty slice.
func Equal(a, b []byte) bool {
        // Neither cmd/compile nor gccgo allocates for these string conversions.
        return string(a) == string(b)
}

However, the []byte->string conversion does allocate on TinyGo. We should replace calls to bytes.Equal with a call to our own function that doesn't allocate.

[aykevl]

I'd like to avoid an optimization like that because it just seems a bit hacky to me. (We have a number of those optimizations in TinyGo, but generally they're to replace a call to a LLVM intrinsic). Instead, I'd propose we add a new transform just like our current OptimizeStringToBytes but the other way round.

Here is the transform:

tinygo/transform/rtcalls.go

Lines 12 to 18 in 731532c

	// OptimizeStringToBytes transforms runtime.stringToBytes(...) calls into const
	// []byte slices whenever possible. This optimizes the following pattern:
	//
	// w.Write([]byte("foo"))
	//
	// where Write does not store to the slice.
	func OptimizeStringToBytes(mod llvm.Module) {

The benefit of doing it like that is that it also fixes every other cast that looks like that, instead of just the bytes.Equal case.

[kevyonan]

shouldn't that do something equivalent like memcmp?

[dgryski]

@assyrianic Yes. You can't just immediately defer to memcmp though because you need to check for nil slices, check the lengths, and dereference the data pointers.

[aykevl]

We should replace calls to bytes.Equal with a call to our own function that doesn't allocate.

Maybe you're right. I looked at #4289 but realized that optimization is a lot less trivial than the existing string-to-[]bytes optimization. I think it can be replaced with a call to runtime.stringEqual (using the len part of the byte slice for the string length).

@lpereira

[lpereira]

There are quite a bit of string(b) conversions in the standard library, too, that would benefit from #4289. I can add a transform that makes bytes.Equal() better by itself, but I'm not sure how beneficial it would be, to be honest.

[soypat]

This is still an issue in dev btw