this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
72 points (97.4% liked)

Programming

17351 readers
287 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
snowe
Ategon
[email protected]
72
How often does branchless programming actually matter? (self.programming)
submitted 1 year ago by firelizzard to c/programming
48 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There are few people who are smarter than a compiler. And those who use "branchless coding" probably aren't.