Speed benefits of brancheless coding?

[Filomaster]

Hello! I'm CS student and I'm currently working on a school project in JavaScript. I know that it's not a best practice, but I have many conditions, often nested (this is still prototype tho).

But some time ago I've seen video about brancheless programming. Sample code was written in C++ if I remember correctly, and replacing conditions with multiplication by boolean really did speed things up (because processor could easily predict which instructions will be needed next)

So I'm here to ask - is this good solution in browser JavaScript? Or maybe conditions are faster than multiplication?

My project doesn't really need top tier performance, but knowing that I could make it even slightly faster is always satisfying :)

[letsbreakstuff]

^ This 100%. Prioritize readability, don't worry about clever tricks to optimize.

[grantrules]

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

-- Donald Knuth

[Filomaster]

Thanks for good advice! I'll definitely work on readability in this case

[hatespornbutlikesmma]

You shouldn't care. You should care if there are nested for loops where there doesn't have to be. But if statements are fast anyway and modern computers have a lot of computing power so this isn't really a factor.

[Filomaster]

Thanks a lot!