> To me the article read as if our job was to make every bit of code as fast as possible. My interpretation was that he thinks the baseline for performance is

> To me the article read as if our job was to make every bit of code as fast as possible. My interpretation was that he thinks the baseline for performance is too low. There are kind of two parts to performance: non-pessimization and optimization. He’s mostly harping on the former point, that you don’t have to go tuning anything. Just by writing code without following the clean code rules you can get a huge speed up for free, without any tuning at all. It’ll be free of obvious overheads, even if it doesn’t do anything special to fully utilize the hardware.