Loop unswitching

Loop unswitching is a compiler optimization. It moves a conditional statement inside a loop outside by duplicating the loop's body and placing a version of it inside each of the if and else clauses of the conditional.^[1] This enhances loop's parallelization. As modern processors can efficiently handle vectors, this optimization increases program speed.

Here is a simple example. Suppose we want to add the two arrays x and y and also do something depending on the variable w. We have the following C code:

bool w; 
int x;
int y;
for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
   x += y;
   if (w) {
      y = 0;
   }
}

The conditional inside this loop makes it difficult to safely parallelize this loop. When we unswitch the loop, this becomes:

bool w;
int x;
int y;
if (w) {
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
        x += y;
        y = 0;
    }
} else {
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
        x += y;
    }
}

While the loop unswitching may double the amount of code written, each of these new loops may now be separately optimized.

Loop unswitching was introduced in gcc in version 3.4.^[2]