[moonchild]

Branches are prone to be faster than conditional moves if they are correctly predicted, because they do not increase the critical path length. And utf-8 decoders are commonly run on all-ascii input. What were you benchmarking on?

[aidenn0]

I ran separate benchmarks on all-ASCII, BMP-only, and ascii with non-BMP. ASCII was not slower on the low-branch version.