Beautiful branchless binary search

If being branchless is important property of the algorithm then it is better to enforce it. Or at least test for it. If his GCC version will get an update and it will stop producing assembly that he wants no-one will ever know.

Which brings us back to regular discussion: C ( and C++ ) does not match hardware anymore. There is no real control over important properties of generated code. Programmers need tools to control what they write. Plug and pray compilation is not a solid engineering approach.

Wasn't C created to avoid matching hardware? I.e. not caring about word size, number of registers, instruction set, etc.

I thought the whole point of writing programs in C was originally being able to write portable software (and a portable OS) that could be executed at different machines? It only became specialized in giving machine-specific instructions when other languages took over.