How often does branchless programming actually matter?

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?

Lanthanae,
@Lanthanae@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It matters if you develop compilers 🤷,

Otherwise? Readability trumps the minute performance gain almost every time (and that’s assuming your compiler won’t automatically do branchless substitutions for performance reasons anyway which it probably will)

Spzi,

The better of those articles and videos also emphasize you should test and measure, before and after you “improved” your code.

I’m afraid there is no standard, average solution. You trying to optimize your code might very well cause it to run slower.

So unless you have good reasons (good as in ‘proof’) to do otherwise, I’d recommend to aim for readable, maintainable code. Which is often not optimized code.

FriendOfFalcons,

I only know of a handful of cases where branchless programming is actually being used. And those are really niche ones.

So no. The average programmer really doesn't need to use it, probably ever.

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