There are cases where the optimization wouldn't be safe (like i < n && a[i] != k) but this is not one of them. Maybe the compiler is just dum. Or maybe avoidi

There are cases where the optimization wouldn't be safe (like i < n && a[i] != k) but this is not one of them. Maybe the compiler is just dum. Or maybe avoiding branches is not clearly faster in cases like this? Have you measured this particular case?