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.

> 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.

Not sure how one relates to the other. Do you want more fine-grained control over emitted assembly? Or do you want a general-purpose CPU that exposes microarchitecture details (i.e. "matching hardware")?

Only the former can be solved by tooling.

C++ could add a an explicit conditional move I suppose. `x` and `y` types would have to be restrictive:

      x = std::cmove(y,flag);

The compiler would be slightly mrve compelled to use a hardware conditional move than in the following case:

      if (flag) x = y;

The other option is to do something more like CUDA / SIMD kernels do ... every line gets executed but each each instruction inside the "false branch" becomes a no-op. Of course this requires hardware support.