Comment by hvdijk

Both ?: and if-else have cases where they can be compiled into cmov type instructions and where they cannot. Given int max(int a, int b) { if (a > b) return a; else return b; }, a decent compiler for X86 will avoid conditional branches even though ?: wasn't used. Given int f(int x) { return x ? g() : h(); }, avoiding conditional branches is more costly than just using them, even though ?: was used.