The keyword is "premature". The whole silly meme of "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is a 100% useless statement. Of course, you shouldn't do i

The keyword is "premature". The whole silly meme of "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is a 100% useless statement. Of course, you shouldn't do it yet if it's premature- that's the definition of premature. But if it's almost the same amount of effort to write faster code from the get go- especially if you KNOW the code will be speed-sensitive, then you should absolutely try to do the fast thing over the slow thing. That seems obvious...