It's usually wrong to assume that expressions that ultimately have the same effect (such as a || b and a | b when both a and b are simple booleans, so no side e

It's usually wrong to assume that expressions that ultimately have the same effect (such as a || b and a | b when both a and b are simple booleans, so no side effects) will make the compiler generate different code depending on which variant to use. The compiler knows that both variants resolve to the same result with no side effects, so it should try to generate whatever code is more efficient. Depending on several factors, that may be machine code that effectively exhibits short circuit behavior or not, for either expression (so even a|b might end up having a short circuit on the lowest level). This would be different if you, e.g., sprinkle some volatile keywords (which effectively introduces side effects), but then you'd probably still want to take more care and split the expressions up, unless you really don't care about the order of your forced memory accesses (i.e. if I recall correctly, there is no guarantee that a|b will access a first, then b). And that's not even going into barriers.