Branchless Programming Examples

📚 Educational Repository — Learn branchless programming techniques through practical examples across multiple languages.

Demonstrates branchless programming techniques using bit manipulation to avoid conditional branches. Each example is fully commented to explain the underlying concepts.

Techniques Shown

• Sign detection - Extract sign bit via right shift
• Branchless minimum - Use sign bit masking to select smaller value

Files

File	Language	Description
program.c	C	Basic examples
program.js	JavaScript	Basic examples
program.py	Python	Basic examples
program.sh	Bash	Basic examples
program.sql	MariaDB SQL	Basic examples
advanced/calculator.py	Python	Function table lookup
advanced/sorting.py	Python	Sorting networks, clamp, abs
advanced/image_processing.py	Python	Pixel ops: threshold, blend, contrast
advanced/state_machine.py	Python	Table-driven state transitions

Why Branchless?

Modern CPUs use branch prediction to speculatively execute instructions before knowing which path a conditional will take. When predictions fail, the pipeline must be flushed and restarted—costing 10-20+ cycles.

Benefits:

• No misprediction penalties - Arithmetic always executes the same way
• Better pipelining - Instructions flow without stalls
• SIMD-friendly - Enables vectorization across multiple data points
• Constant-time execution - Useful in cryptography to prevent timing attacks

Trade-offs:

• Code is harder to read and maintain
• May compute unnecessary values
• Not always faster—profile before optimizing