[superblas]

My understanding is that the cost that is mentioned comes from the branch introduced by checking if the dereference is in-bounds (and the optimizations these checks allegedly prohibit), not from what happens if an OOB access is detected

[Gibbon1]

Where I feel that breaks down while probably leet code would be faster. But high quality code tends to have checks to make sure operations are safe. So you got branches anyways in real code.