Not to mention branches and branch prediction can be a cause of understudied (and possibly) vulnerable interactions like Spectre/Meltdown. It's also worth ment

Not to mention branches and branch prediction can be a cause of understudied (and possibly) vulnerable interactions like Spectre/Meltdown. It's also worth mentioning that branching is a critical part of any recursive function, or else it would not know when to terminate. In some cases the function call could be linearized, but it again becomes a compiler runtime cost analysis.