Knowing the number of iteration a loop will go through allows the compiler to do some optimization. Consider for instance the two loops below :

Unknown iteration count :

static void bitreverse(vbuf_desc * vbuf)
{
    unsigned int idx = 0;
    unsigned char * img = vbuf->usrptr;

    while(idx < vbuf->bytesused) {
        img[idx] = bitrev[img[idx]];
        idx++;
    }

}

Known iteration count

static void bitreverse(vbuf_desc * vbuf)
{
    unsigned int idx = 0;
    unsigned char * img = vbuf->usrptr;

    while(idx < 1280*400) {
        img[idx] = bitrev[img[idx]];
        idx++;
    }

}

The second version will compile to faster code, because it will be unrolled twice (on ARM with gcc 4.6.3 and -O2 at least). Is there a way to make assertion on the loop count that gcc will take into account when optimizing ?

c optimization gcc
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