I’ve started noticing articles and YouTube videos touting the benefits of branchless programming, making it sound like this is a hot new technique (or maybe a hot old technique) that everyone should be using. But it seems like it’s only really applicable to data processing applications (as opposed to general programming) and there are very few times in my career where I’ve needed to use, much less optimize, data processing code. And when I do, I use someone else’s library.
How often does branchless programming actually matter in the day to day life of an average developer?
How often does branchless programming actually matter in the day to day life of an average developer?
Barely never. When writing some code that really has to be high performance (i.e. where you know it slows down your program), it can help to think about if there are branches or jumps that you can potentially simplify or eliminate.
Of course some things are often branchless, for example GPU shaders, which need very high performance and which usually always do the same things. But that’s an exception.
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Barely never. When writing some code that really has to be high performance (i.e. where you know it slows down your program), it can help to think about if there are branches or jumps that you can potentially simplify or eliminate.
Of course some things are often branchless, for example GPU shaders, which need very high performance and which usually always do the same things. But that’s an exception.
There are few people who are smarter than a compiler. And those who use “branchless coding” probably aren’t.