I think side effect is a red-herring here: it's idiomatic to rely on short circuiting when the RHS relies on the LHS being true to be safe to call at all. In

I think side effect is a red-herring here: it's idiomatic to rely on short circuiting when the RHS relies on the LHS being true to be safe to call at all. In the above example, we check that the pointer is non-null before calling it. The "side effect" we are avoiding is a segfault. In the code that splits the conditional into two, the callback is still run inside a conditional, just by itself.