I'm not denigrating his bona fides, I'm questioning his credentials on performance-oriented computing. For all I know, if Rob Pike had been a performance freak,

I'm not denigrating his bona fides, I'm questioning his credentials on performance-oriented computing. For all I know, if Rob Pike had been a performance freak, Blit might've never shipped. He may indeed have chosen all the right trade-offs. Nevertheless, the advice he gives on performance is wrong, plain and simple, for the reason that I gave you: If you have overhead everywhere, there is no bottleneck that you can observe - your software is just slower than it needs to be across the board. If you write software without performance in mind from the very beginning, you can never get all of it back by optimizing later - without major rewrites that is. How does one give wrong advice? By not having the required experience to give correct advice. I don't care if you're Rob Pike, Dennis Ritchie or Donald Knuth. If you're wrong, you're wrong.