To be pedantic, the answer is neither. You use an abstraction that supports either answer with similar ease, provided by the language/framework/tools you used.

To be pedantic, the answer is neither. You use an abstraction that supports either answer with similar ease, provided by the language/framework/tools you used. You bring up a very real point, but the most obvious cases are also most obvious to the people developing the stack below you and have almost certainly gone through the trouble of solving those problems. This issue rears its head when edge cases are non-obvious and typically manifest through profiling, not through design meetings.