Byte count has poor codegen with autovectorization

[danielhuang]

I'm currently writing some code that counts the amount of a certain byte (newlines in this example) in a large byte slice (>1GB):

fn count(b: &[u8]) -> usize {
    b.iter().filter(|&&x| x == b'\n').count()
}

When compiled with -C target-feature=+avx2, avx2 instructions are emitted from autovectorization, but is still around 2x slower than bytecount.

Using portable_simd, the code can be made faster:

fn count_simd(b: &[u8]) -> usize {
    let (begin, mid, end) = b.as_simd::<64>();
    count(begin)
        + count(end)
        + mid
            .iter()
            .map(|x| {
                x.simd_eq(Simd::splat(b'\n'))
                    .select(Simd::splat(1u8), Simd::splat(0u8))
                    .reduce_sum()
            })
            .map(|x| x as usize)
            .sum::<usize>()
}

This has similar performance with bytecount::count.

https://rust.godbolt.org/z/6b5bTKoa9