it's one instruction in the generated code and we can reasonably expect the branch predictor to do the right thing, but branches and error handling can inhibit

it's one instruction in the generated code and we can reasonably expect the branch predictor to do the right thing, but branches and error handling can inhibit vectorization which is a much higher performance cost. While in this particular case you probably aren't vectorizing much, it is not always the case that error handling is almost free