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

Programming

17479 readers
320 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€“] firelizzard 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you're writing data processing code, there are real advantages to avoiding branches, and its especially helpful for SIMD/vectorization such as with AVX instructions or code for a GPU (i.e. shaders). My question is not about whether its helpful - it definitely is in the right circumstances - but about how often those circumstances occur.

[โ€“] lowleveldata 2 points 1 year ago

Ya, and my examination is I don't think it has practical impacts for day to day tasks. Unless you're writing AVX instructions day to day but then you already knew the answer.