Is it possible to write Quake's fast InvSqrt() function in C#?
You should be able to use the StructLayout and FieldOffset attributes to fake a union for plain old data like floats and ints.
[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit, Size=4)]
private struct IntFloat {
[FieldOffset(0)]
public float floatValue;
[FieldOffset(0)]
public int intValue;
// redundant assignment to avoid any complaints about uninitialized members
IntFloat(int x) {
floatValue = 0;
intValue = x;
}
IntFloat(float x) {
intValue = 0;
floatValue = x;
}
public static explicit operator float (IntFloat x) {
return x.floatValue;
}
public static explicit operator int (IntFloat x) {
return x.intValue;
}
public static explicit operator IntFloat (int i) {
return new IntFloat(i);
}
public static explicit operator IntFloat (float f) {
return new IntFloat(f);
}
}
Then translating InvSqrt is easy.
Use BitConverter if you want to avoid unsafe code.
float InvSqrt(float x)
{
float xhalf = 0.5f * x;
int i = BitConverter.SingleToInt32Bits(x);
i = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1);
x = BitConverter.Int32BitsToSingle(i);
x = x * (1.5f - xhalf * x * x);
return x;
}
The code above uses new methods introduced in .NET Core 2.0. For .NET Framework, you have to fall back to the following (which performs allocations):
float InvSqrt(float x)
{
float xhalf = 0.5f * x;
int i = BitConverter.ToInt32(BitConverter.GetBytes(x), 0);
i = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1);
x = BitConverter.ToSingle(BitConverter.GetBytes(i), 0);
x = x * (1.5f - xhalf * x * x);
return x;
}
Otherwise, the C# code is exactly the same as the C code you gave, except that the method needs to be marked as unsafe:
unsafe float InvSqrt(float x) { ... }
Definitely possible in unsafe mode. Note that even though in the Quake 3 source code the constant 0x5f3759df
was used, numerical research showed that the constant 0x5f375a86
actually yields better results for Newton Approximations.