I’ve started noticing articles and YouTube videos touting the benefits of branchless programming, making it sound like this is a hot new technique (or maybe a hot old technique) that everyone should be using. But it seems like it’s only really applicable to data processing applications (as opposed to general programming) and there are very few times in my career where I’ve needed to use, much less optimize, data processing code. And when I do, I use someone else’s library.
How often does branchless programming actually matter in the day to day life of an average developer?
I wonder how relevant this is to Go (which is what I work in these days), at least for simple data retrieval services. I can see how transforming code to a functional style could improve clarity, but Go pretty much completely eliminates the need to worry about threads. I can write IO bound code and be confident that Go will shuffle my routines between existing threads and create new OS threads as the existing ones are blocked by syscalls. Though I suppose to achieve high performance I may need to start thinking about that more carefully.
On the other hand, the other major component of the system I’m working on is responsible for executing business logic. It’s probably too late to adopt a reactive programming approach, but it does seem like a more interesting problem than reactive programming for a data retrieval service.