upb has traditionally returned 16-byte-aligned pointers from arena allocation. This was out of an abundance of caution, since users could theoretically be using upb arenas to allocate memory that is then used for SSE/AVX values (eg. [`__m128`](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cpp/m128?view=msvc-170), which require 16-byte alignment.
In practice, the protobuf C++ arena has used 8-byte alignment for 8 years with no significant problems I know of arising from SSE etc.
Reducing the alignment requirement to 8 will save memory. It will also help with compatibility on 32-bit architectures where `malloc()` only returns 8-byte aligned memory. The immediate motivation is to fix the win32 build for Python protobuf.
PiperOrigin-RevId: 448331777
There was a bug in our arena code where we assumed that
sizeof(upb_array) would be a multiple of 8. On i386 it was
not, and this was causing memory corruption on 32-bit builds.
New code is smaller (in both source size and compiled size) and faster.
# Speed
The decoder speeds up on all machines I tested, though the amount of speedup varies. I was only able to test Intel CPUs.
### Linux Desktop
```
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz
OS: Linux
name old time/op new time/op delta
CreateArena 4.72ns ± 0% 4.93ns ± 0% +4.47% (p=0.000 n=11+11)
ParseDescriptor 12.4µs ± 1% 9.1µs ± 1% -26.65% (p=0.000 n=11+11)
```
### Mac Laptop
```
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8850H CPU @ 2.60GHz
OS: macOS
name old time/op new time/op delta
CreateArena 5.33ns ± 3% 5.58ns ± 2% +4.69% (p=0.000 n=12+12)
ParseDescriptor 15.0µs ± 2% 11.9µs ± 2% -20.20% (p=0.000 n=12+12)
```
### Linux Workstation
```
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6154 CPU @ 3.00GHz
OS: Linux
name old time/op new time/op delta
CreateArena 5.29ns ± 0% 5.52ns ± 0% +4.37% (p=0.000 n=10+12)
ParseDescriptor 18.6µs ± 0% 16.4µs ± 0% -11.54% (p=0.000 n=12+12)
```
# Size
A few source files grow marginally because of some arena functionality moved inline. But `upb/decode.c` shrinks by 30% on Linux:
```
VM SIZE
--------------
+2.1% +283 upb/json_decode.c
+24% +205 upb/msg.c
+8.4% +115 upb/upb.c
+0.9% +28 upb/reflection.c
[ = ] 0 upb/def.c
[ = ] 0 upb/encode.c
[ = ] 0 upb/json_encode.c
[ = ] 0 upb/table.c
-30.3% -1.51Ki upb/decode.c
-0.7% -738 TOTAL
```
Map parsing/serializing relies on map entries always
having a predictable order. The code that generates
layout was not respecting this in the case of string
keys and primitive values.
Eric Salo
Protobuf Team Bot
Joshua Haberman
Protobuf Team
Matt Kulukundis
Joshua Haberman