Loop-invariant conditional can be moved out of the loop to save computations.
Move the invariant conditional out of the loop.
A conditional is said to be invariant when it evaluates to the same value (either true or false) for all the iterations of a loop. By that definition, there is no need to repeat the evaluation of the condition in each iteration since it will not change from one iteration to another. Therefore, those computations required for the evaluation can be saved by extracting the conditional out of the loop. In some cases this will result in duplicating the loop for each possible result of the conditional. In these scenarios, the code may be larger but it should also become faster.
Note
This optimization is called loop unswitching and the compilers can do it automatically in simple cases. However, in more complex cases, the compiler will omit this optimization and therefore it is beneficial to do it manually..
The following loop increments a variable by 1 or 2 depending on the function argument:
void example(int addTwo) {
int sum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
sum += addTwo ? 2 : 1;
}
}In each iteration, the increment statement evaluates the argument to decide how much to increment. However, this value is fixed for the whole execution of the function and thus, the conditional can be moved outside of the loop. The resulting code is as follows:
void example(int addTwo) {
int sum = 0;
int add = addTwo ? 2 : 1
for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
sum += add;
}
}