Background
Loop unrolling revolves around lowering the number of branches made, by batching them together. To handle cases where the number of iterations is not divisible by the unrolled-loop increments, a common technique is to jump directly into the middle of the unrolled loop for copying the remainder.
Duff was looking for a similar optimization for his case, and succeeded in doing so in C, unrolling a loop into a loop which assigns (up to) 8 values on each iteration.
Read more about this topic: Duff's Device
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