[dkersten]

Really? In what case? It’s just an expression and the entire statement just uses the expression result.

Of course when optimising code like this, I think it’s important to look at the generated assembly anyway and then you can be sure that it does what you expect on the compilers you intend on supporting (doubly so when you want to generate conditional moves — I’ve found that to be a bit of a puzzle where I sometimes need to move things around as the obvious code still generated a branch), but at least GCC and Clang won’t generate a branch for using just a comparison. Maybe it’s not the compiler and instead the target architecture? In x86, comparisons set flags, so by themselves aren’t branches. In any case, I recommend using compiler explorer when working on code where this matters.

[flohofwoe]

Setting the CPU flag after a comparison doesn't do anything useful yet, you also need to perform an addition with 1 or do nothing depending on the flag, and selecting between these two options is usually done with a conditional branch, unless the CPU can execute ALU instructions conditionally (ARM can do this, x86 only has conditional mov AFAIK).

[gpderetta]

You can copy a flag in the al register then add that. That's usually what the compiler generates.

[flohofwoe]

Also, apparently ARM64 did drop the conditional instructions (somehow I missed the memo):

https://offlinemark.com/2023/07/29/til-arm64-doesnt-include-...