Reasons For Use in Practice
In most practical scenarios, the trivial swap algorithm using a temporary register is more efficient. Limited situations in which XOR swapping may be practical include:
- On a processor where the instruction set encoding permits the XOR swap to be encoded in a smaller number of bytes;
- In a region with high register pressure, it may allow the register allocator to avoid spilling a register.
- In microcontrollers where available RAM is very limited.
Because these situations are rare, most optimizing compilers do not generate XOR swap code.
Read more about this topic: XOR Swap Algorithm
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