Saturating additions do not have associative property. Therefore by default, the compiler does not re-associate saturating additions. --reassociate_saturation instructs the compiler to re-associate saturating additions to perform optimization. --no_reassociate_saturation prohibits re-association of saturating addition, and thus limits the level of optimization on saturating arithmetic. --reassociate_saturation enables optimizations such as vectorizing code when automatic vectorization is enabled using --vectorize. It also enables other optimizations when --vectorize is not specified, for example when compiling with -O3 -Otime.

Saturating addition is not associative, so enabling --reassociate_saturation could affect the result with a reduction in accuracy.

The default is --no_reassociate_saturation.

The following code contains the function L_mac, which performs saturating additions. Therefore the compiler does not vectorize this code unless --reassociate_saturation and --vectorize are specified.

#include <dspfns.h>
int f(short *a, short *b)
{
    int i;
    int r = 0;
    for (i = 0; i < 100; i++)
         r=L_mac(r,a[i],b[i]);
    return r;
}