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Computer Science > Programming Languages

arXiv:2512.22390 (cs)
[Submitted on 26 Dec 2025]

Title:Eliminate Branches by Melding IR Instructions

Authors:Yuze Li, Srinivasan Ramachandra Sharma, Charitha Saumya, Ali
R. Butt, Kirshanthan Sundararajah
View a PDF of the paper titled Eliminate Branches by Melding IR
Instructions, by Yuze Li and 4 other authors
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    Abstract:Branch mispredictions cause catastrophic performance
    penalties in modern processors, leading to performance loss.
    While hardware predictors and profile-guided techniques exist,
    data-dependent branches with irregular patterns remain
    challenging. Traditional if-conversion eliminates branches via
    software predication but faces limitations on architectures like
    x86. It often fails on paths containing memory instructions or
    incurs excessive instruction overhead by fully speculating large
    branch bodies.
    This paper presents Melding IR Instructions (MERIT), a compiler
    transformation that eliminates branches by aligning and melding
    similar operations from divergent paths at the IR instruction
    level. By observing that divergent paths often perform
    structurally similar operations with different operands, MERIT
    adapts sequence alignment to discover merging opportunities and
    employs safe operand-level guarding to ensure semantic
    correctness without hardware predication. Implemented as an LLVM
    pass and evaluated on 102 programs from four benchmark suites,
    MERIT achieves a geometric mean speedup of 10.9% with peak
    improvements of 32x compared to hardware branch predictor,
    demonstrating the effectiveness with reduced static instruction
    overhead.

Subjects: Programming Languages (cs.PL)
Cite as:  arXiv:2512.22390 [cs.PL]
          (or arXiv:2512.22390v1 [cs.PL] for this version)
          https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.22390
          Focus to learn more
          arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Yuze Li [view email]
[v1] Fri, 26 Dec 2025 21:32:26 UTC (2,102 KB)
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