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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

Because it's rare for a branch result to be random. The compiler/runtime/cpu/etc can often guess which result is more likely, and correctly not do the extra work in the first place, and so that's usually the better strategy than spending silicon and heat on the wrong answer just in case.

I think a lot of people don't have an intuition about how accurate branch prediction can be, but if you look at your own code, you'll quickly realize "well, yeah, control flow is almost always going to go this way and we just have this branch so we can handle the exceptional case" -- compilers can often deduce this pretty well themselves now, and cpus/jits/runtimes can develop some pretty impressive heuristics as well, and when all those fail you can often add explicit hints in your code that tell your compiler/etc what you expect if they can't guess.

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> it's rare for a branch result to be random

How rare, though?

QuickSort has fundamentally unpredictable branches, and it’s a pretty widely used algorithm. Binary search, B-trees also come to mind.

Binary searching is quite slow and should be used sparingly but not because of branch misprediction necessarily but because of memory stalls - you're almost always guaranteed to have a cache miss during the search. Similarly for B-trees it's going to be memory stalls that you're probably more focused on addressing, not branch mispredicts.

This probably depends on the size of the area to be searched, and just how hot that region is. After all, if it's fairly small, there won't be any cache misses, and the data structure does use less memory than a typical hash table, which is itself an advantage.

If the size of the data is small, a linear search through a contiguous array is going to be far faster than anything more complex.

Yep; though we'd have to test a few cases to figure out what the cutoffs are here, and if there's any middle ground left for a divide-and-conquer strategy.

It's also definitely going to depend on the cost of the hash function and comparison function - for something like strings, where those can be quite expensive, binary search probably has a better chance of applicability than for guid's say.

For things with non-trivial comparison functions you're all but certainly better off with those in something else like a hashmap. After all, the more expensive the compare, the more expensive the sort & reordering that a binary search requires. And then for trivial comparison objects, binary searching is still slower even at "huge" sizes like 10,000. It's really hard to find a good use of binary searching an array on modern CPUs.

Well, it depends on how expensive your comparison is compared to a cache miss.

B-trees are cache friendly, spending more time doing linear scans at each level to keep the tree shallow, and thus indirection less frequent. They're designed for high latency indirection - loading pages from spinning rust.

Most code with branches is not “algorithms”. (Bear with me.) It’s simple loops and function calls and vtable indirection. Those can be predicted with very high accuracy, and loops in particular by their very nature dominate execution. For every unpredictable branch in your quicksort there are several very predictable branches that do things like check bounds, the recursion base case, and return address.

Also happens to be why quicksort loses to almost anything else on small arrays, even bubble sort

Qsort can be implemented branchless by converting the branch into a data dependency.

In benchmarks, branch predictors guess correctly 90-95% of the time.

Loops are usually much more one way than the other.

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