只是加了一个注释

在一些基于vm的语言中，x *= 0.5通常会更快——尤其是actionscript，因为变量不需要被检查是否除以0。

使用除法(/)，假设这样更清楚。编译器将相应地进行优化。

第一个看起来像除法吗?不。如果你想除法，用x / 2。如果可能的话，编译器可以优化它使用位移位(它被称为强度减少)，这使得它成为一个无用的微优化，如果你自己做它。

查看编译器的输出来帮助您做出决定。我在x86-64上使用 gcc (gcc) 4.2.1 20070719 [FreeBSD]

也可以在godbolt上看到编译器的在线输出。

What you see is the compiler does use a sarl (arithmetic right-shift) instruction in both cases, so it does recognize the similarity between the two expressions. If you use the divide, the compiler also needs to adjust for negative numbers. To do that it shifts the sign bit down to the lowest order bit, and adds that to the result. This fixes the off-by-one issue when shifting negative numbers, compared to what a divide would do. Since the divide case does 2 shifts, while the explicit shift case only does one, we can now explain some of the performance differences measured by other answers here.

C代码与汇编输出:

对于除法，你的输入是

int div2signed(int a) {
  return a / 2;
}

这个编译成

    movl    %edi, %eax
    shrl    $31, %eax            # (unsigned)x >> 31
    addl    %edi, %eax           # tmp = x + (x<0)
    sarl    %eax                 # (x + 0 or 1) >> 1  arithmetic right shift
    ret

shift也是一样

int shr2signed(int a) {
  return a >> 1;
}

输出:

    sarl    %edi
    movl    %edi, %eax
    ret

其他isa即使不能做得更好，也能同样有效地做到这一点。例如GCC For AArch64使用:

        add     w0, w0, w0, lsr 31      // x += (unsigned)x>>31
        asr     w0, w0, 1               // x >>= 1
        ret

我们有很多理由支持使用x = x / 2;以下是一些例子:

it expresses your intent more clearly (assuming you're not dealing with bit twiddling register bits or something) the compiler will reduce this to a shift operation anyway even if the compiler didn't reduce it and chose a slower operation than the shift, the likelihood that this ends up affecting your program's performance in a measurable way is itself vanishingly small (and if it does affect it measurably, then you have an actual reason to use a shift) if the division is going to be part of a larger expression, you're more likely to get the precedence right if you use the division operator: x = x / 2 + 5; x = x >> 1 + 5; // not the same as above signed arithmetic might complicate things even more than the precedence problem mentioned above to reiterate - the compiler will already do this for you anyway. In fact, it'll convert division by a constant to a series of shifts, adds, and multiplies for all sorts of numbers, not just powers of two. See this question for links to even more information about this.

简而言之，当你真正想要进行乘法或除法运算时，编写移位代码并没有什么好处，除了可能会增加引入错误的可能性。自从编译器不够聪明到在适当的时候优化这类事情到移位以来，已经过去了。

使用x = x / 2;或x /= 2;因为将来有可能会有一个新的程序员使用它。因此，他更容易发现代码行中发生了什么。每个人可能都不知道这种优化。