You don't necessarily need that actually, there are carry flags that are set on overflow that you can check to get that extra bit of precision. In Rust you can

You don't necessarily need that actually, there are carry flags that are set on overflow that you can check to get that extra bit of precision. In Rust you can actually do this using the checked add/sub/etc methods. It's one of the things I really appreciate about the language. By default, it panics on overflow in debug builds. You have to use the wrapping variants to declare that's intentional. How about: if a > b { mid = (a-b)/2 } else { mid = (b-a)/2 } There must be a way to do it without the branch? edit: Yes, in the article, I'm an idiot.