Probably Dance

I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D“. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s impossible to google, but looking at the algorithm I couldn’t help but think “this is branchless.” And who knew that there could be a branchless binary search? So I did the work to translate it into a algorithm for C++ iterators, no longer requiring one-based indexing or fixed-size arrays.

In GCC it is more than twice as fast as std::lower_bound, which is already a very high quality binary search. The search loop is simple and the generated assembly is beautiful. I’m astonished that this exists and nobody seems to be using it…