I never really had a problem with it, at least so far. Actually a few years ago i wrote a 3D game for DOS using Free Pascal[0] (here is a review from a YouTube

I never really had a problem with it, at least so far. Actually a few years ago i wrote a 3D game for DOS using Free Pascal[0] (here is a review from a YouTuber[1]) and the performance was decent, though i did write the rasterizer inner loop in assembly (not that great assembly TBH but still slightly better than what FPC generated). I did optimize it over time and expectedly, the biggest gains weren't from microptimizations but from changing how rendering works (e.g. i got a boost by adding a PVS and then another by replacing the PVS with portals since the PVS wasn't that great :-P and then yet another when i added mesh occlusion culling using data from the previous frame). About the engine i linked at in my post, i also did a few optimizations but again they weren't microoptimizations but just algorithmic changes. I did write a profiler[2][3] a couple of years ago that helped (the video shows it in practice with the engine) but it uses some Windows-specific functionality and i've switched to Linux since then. Perf works fine under Linux with FPC, but FPWProf (my profiler) has some useful functionality and i'd like to port it to Linux at some point. [0] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo7VlrYiTeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo7VlrYiTeE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0wmN9J8Ts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0wmN9J8Ts [3] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/fpwprof/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/fpwprof/