After years of working on parsers I write expressions like this mechanically: unsigned((ch | ‘ ‘) - ‘a’) < 26 ... and forget that this isn’t obvious.
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Typically the character will be sign-extended and the result will be branched upon, so you get or+sub+cmp+ja which is probably optimal. The codegen for naive version is highly dependent on the compiler - likely way worse for MSVC
> likely way worse for MSVC After doing enough godbolt compares between clang/gcc/msvc, I've found this to almost always be the case. (Just tested--with /O2, msvc has two jumps). I'm still trying to figure out what clang is doing with the naive one.
