Why would a language NOT use Short-circuit evaluation?

Question

Why would a language NOT use Short-circuit evaluation? Are there any benefits of not using it?

I see that it could lead to some performances issues... is that true?

Answer 1

Bill has alluded to a valid reason not to use short-circuiting but to spell it in more detail: highly parallel architectures sometimes have problem with branching control paths.

Take NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture for example. The graphics chips use an SIMT architecture which means that the same code is executed on many parallel threads. However, this only works if all threads take the same conditional branch every time. If different threads take different code paths, evaluation is serialized – which means that the advantage of parallelization is lost, because some of the threads have to wait while others execute the alternative code branch.

Short-circuiting actually involves branching the code so short-circuit operations may be harmful on SIMT architectures like CUDA.

– But like Bill said, that’s a hardware consideration. As far as languages go, I’d answer your question with a resounding no: preventing short-circuiting does not make sense.