In addition to the unexpected high costs of following pointers, the cost of searching an array is often less than you&#x27;d expect thanks to branch prediction.<p>What is that?  Well CPUs actually process a statement in several steps, and try to process several statements at a time.  But what if you have an if?  The solution is to guess which way it will turn out, then begin on the expected branch before it is done evaluating the if.  If the if turns out as expected, this goes faster.  If not, the partially done work is thrown out, and the other branch is run.  This is a substantial speedup when branches are predicted correctly.<p>When you search through an array you often get into a situation where most of the time the if turns out the same way.  &quot;Is this bigger than my max?  No.  Is this bigger than my max?  No....&quot;  As a result branch prediction makes this execute surprisingly quickly.