In the HPC / offline graphics / simulation world, there's lots of things like sparse arrays / grids, where you index into compacted grids and iterators wouldn't be that practical in that scenario (i.e. one single item, although for things like filtering with surrounding cells they can still be useful sometimes), and bounds checks do make a bit of a difference there (it's definitely measureable above the noise threshold), and due to the random nature of the data, the branch predictors don't help avoid the overhead.