The analogy of programming vs cooking is common, but thanks for really developing and writing out the idea. > Unlike a human cook leafing through a book, compu

The analogy of programming vs cooking is common, but thanks for really developing and writing out the idea. > Unlike a human cook leafing through a book, computers don’t mind lots of cross-referencing. (page 6) Not really relevant to the target audience, but computers do mind excessive cross referencing. Having many function calls in a hot loop will hurt performance compared to if they were inlined. I think the analogy of cookbooks and how much cross-referencing they do probably works well to explain optimally inlining at the compiler level (balance of program size versus speed).