If you change logic and/or to bitwise and/or then it'll be branchless.

True: https://godbolt.org/#g:!((g:!((g:!((h:codeEditor,i:(filename... but I understood hoten to be saying that compilers would generally produce that version from the short-circuiting version, and they don't.

Yeah I was wrong.

Do we know why the compiler doesn't do it? Surely the output is the same and avoiding branches is clearly faster.

Maybe short circuiting requires such an optimization not be made?

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?