Question

This is a situation I encounter frequently as an inexperienced programmer and am wondering about particularly for an ambitious, speed-intensive project of mine I’m trying to optimize. For the major C-like languages (C, objC, C++, Java, C#, etc) and their usual compilers, will these two functions run just as efficiently? Is there any difference in the compiled code?

void foo1(bool flag)
{
    if (flag)
    {
        //Do stuff
        return;
    }

    //Do different stuff
}

void foo2(bool flag)
{
    if (flag)
    {
        //Do stuff
    }
    else
    {
        //Do different stuff
    }
}

Basically, is there ever a direct efficiency bonus/penalty when breaking or returning early? How is the stackframe involved? Are there optimized special cases? Are there any factors (like inlining or the size of “Do stuff”) that could affect this significantly?

I’m always a proponent of improved legibility over minor optimizations (I see foo1 a lot with parameter validation), but this comes up so frequently that I’d like to set aside all worry once and for all.

And I’m aware of the pitfalls of premature optimization… ugh, those are some painful memories.

EDIT: I accepted an answer, but EJP’s answer explains pretty succinctly why the use of a return is practically negligible (in assembly, the return creates a ‘branch’ to the end of the function, which is extremely fast. The branch alters the PC register and may also affect the cache and pipeline, which is pretty minuscule.) For this case in particular, it literally makes no difference because both the if/else and the return create the same branch to the end of the function.

Answer 1

There is no difference at all:

=====> cat test_return.cpp
extern void something();
extern void something2();

void test(bool b)
{
    if(b)
    {
        something();
    }
    else
        something2();
}
=====> cat test_return2.cpp
extern void something();
extern void something2();

void test(bool b)
{
    if(b)
    {
        something();
        return;
    }
    something2();
}
=====> rm -f test_return.s test_return2.s
=====> g++ -S test_return.cpp 
=====> g++ -S test_return2.cpp 
=====> diff test_return.s test_return2.s
=====> rm -f test_return.s test_return2.s
=====> clang++ -S test_return.cpp 
=====> clang++ -S test_return2.cpp 
=====> diff test_return.s test_return2.s
=====> 

Meaning no difference in generated code whatsoever even without optimization in two compilers