> Optimization often involves making code less clear, more brittle, or with a more pasta-like organization. Frequently optimization requires writing code that i

> Optimization often involves making code less clear, more brittle, or with a more pasta-like organization. Frequently optimization requires writing code that if looked at out of context, doesn't make sense or might even look wrong. I don't agree with that. It may be true for very low level micro-optimizations, but isn't usually the case for higher level optimizations that give the best performance improvements. A lot of times code can be sped up significantly just by using a different data structure or caching a value that's already computed somewhere else. For example, I've seen production C++ where the code was using a std::vector to keep a list of items in sorted order and remove duplicates. It was trivially converted to a std::set and saved several seconds of run time.