The only potential benefit to ternary operators over plain if statements in my view is their ability to be used for initializations, which is particularly useful for const:
E.g.
const int foo = (a > b ? b : a - 10);
Doing this with an if/else block is impossible without using a function cal as well. If you happen to have lots of cases of const things like this you might find there's a small gain from initializing a const properly over assignment with if/else. Measure it! Probably won't even be measurable though. The reason I tend to do this is because by marking it const the compiler knows when I do something later that could/would accidentally change something I thought was fixed.
Effectively what I'm saying is that ternary operator is important for const-correctness, and const correctness is a great habit to be in:
- This saves a lot of your time by letting the compiler help you spot mistakes you make
- This can potentially let the compiler apply other optimizations
