Conditional jumps tend to carry performance penalties because they tend to trash the look-ahead. And are pretty much forbidden in some cryptographic code where

Conditional jumps tend to carry performance penalties because they tend to trash the look-ahead. And are pretty much forbidden in some cryptographic code where you want constant time execution no matter what. Also, so long as the hardware ensures that you don't get away with using the null I would think that not doing the test is the proper approach. Hitting a null is a bug, period (although it could be a third party at fault.) And I would say that adding a millisecond to the bugged path (but, library makers, please always make safe routines available! More than once I've seen stuff that provides no test for whether something exists. I really didn't like it the day I found the routine that returned the index of the supplied value or -1 if it didn't exist--but it wasn't exposed, only the return the index or throw if it didn't exist was accessible.) vs saving a nanosecond on the correct path is the right decision.