Unrolling

Definitions

1. A compiler or manual optimization technique that replaces a loop with repeated copies of its body, reducing the overhead of branch instructions and loop-counter increments while enabling further optimizations like instruction-level parallelism.

   In plain English: Speeding up a repetitive task by writing out the steps multiple times instead of using a loop, so the computer spends less time checking whether to keep going.

   Example: "The tight inner loop was bottlenecked on branch mispredicts, so I manually unrolled it four times and got a 30% speedup."

Related Terms

• lazy loading
• Cache
• Profile
• Vectorization
• Hot Path
• JIT Compiler
• Loop Unrolling
• Object File
• Optimization
• Profile Guided Optimization
• Undefined Behavior