Thank you for this comment! I was sitting here, metaphorically scratching my head, trying to figure out how the hell you can call this branchless when there's clearly an `if` in there:

        for (step /= 2; step != 0; step /= 2) {
        if (compare(begin[step], value))
            begin += step;
        }

Your comment, especially this part, made it click for me:

> You can achieve the same effect as cmov by using bitwise operations and a subtraction, though it'd just be a few cycles slower--but it would be even more clear that it doesn't branch.

BTW, I hate how the author doesn't use braces with this `if` statement. Many a production bug, including one in OSX, as I recall, have occurred because someone didn't want to type a couple extra characters.