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?
Do you recall what the presentation was called? I built a pipelined packet processing system (for debugging packets sent over an RF channel) which sounds like a fairly representative example of what you’re talking about, but it’s not obvious to me how to naturally extend that to other types of projects.
I don’t remember the presentation, but luckily I did remember the concept and here’s an article: https://netflixtechblog.com/reactive-programming-in-the-netflix-api-with-rxjava-7811c3a1496a
It’s called “reactive” programming and that article goes over some of the basic premises. The context of the presentation was in front-end (web) code where it’s a god awful mess if you try to handle it in an imperative programming style. React = reactive programming. If you’ve ever wondered why React took off like it did, it’s because these concepts transformed the hellish nightmare landscape of jquery and cobbled together websites into something resembling manageable complexity (I’m ignoring a lot of stuff in between, the best parts of Angular were reactive too).
Reactive programming is really a pipeline of your data. So the concepts are applicable to all sorts of development, from low level packet processing, to web application development on both the front and back end, to data processing, to anything else. You can use these patterns in any software, but unless your data is async it’s just “functional programming”.
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.