use Perl

Parrot provides two opcodes to branch on the truthness of a register: if and unless. It looks like that it's just a matter of taste, which one to use. Is it really?

Not with modern CPUs with branch prediction rules and with JIT code inside tight inner loops. Below are two versions of the ackermann function, one written with if and one using unless. (If you are missing the loop in the code, well, that's coming from tailcall optimization, turned on with -Oc.)

$ cat ack-if.pir
.sub ack
  .param int x
  .param int y
  if x goto a1
    inc y
    .return (y)
a1:
  if y goto a2
    dec x
    .return ack(x, 1)
a2:
  dec y
  y = ack(x, y)
  dec x
  .return ack(x, y)
.end


$ cat ack-unless.pir
.sub ack
  .param int x
  .param int y
  unless x goto a1
  unless y goto a2
  dec y
  y = ack(x, y)
  dec x
  .return ack(x, y)
a1:
  inc y
  .return (y)
a2:
  dec x
  .return ack(x, 1)
.end


And here are the timings of both with ./parrot -Oc -Cj ack-xx.pir 12 on an AMD X2@2000:

ack-if      2.9 s
ack-unless  2.4 s

Branches with positive branch offsets (downwards) are considered to be likely not taken, that is the fall-through case is the default one. As there are a lot more positive numbers than the one zero, the unless is the better choice here (for some CPUs, YMMV). Well, that's at least my conclusion for now. But there is another issue: branch alignment. I've not yet experimented with different label alignments, but I know that alignment can cause timing differences like above too.