Rust High Performance

The relevance of branch prediction for our code

This book is not about creating processors, so you might think that all this branch prediction theory does not make sense for our use case of improving the efficiency of our Rust code. But the reality is that this theory can make us develop more efficient applications.

First, knowing that patterns in conditional execution will probably be detected after two passes by new and expensive processors will make us try to use those patterns if we know that our code will be mainly used by newer processors. On the other hand, if we know that our code will run in a cheaper or older processor, we might optimize its execution by maybe writing the result of the pattern condition sequentially if possible ...