Unrolling loops is premature optimization, and we all should know what that is the equivalent of. Unroll your loop once they are tried, tested, and working cor

Unrolling loops is premature optimization, and we all should know what that is the equivalent of. Unroll your loop once they are tried, tested, and working correctly, and a profiler finds out you spend much too time in the specific parts that would be discarded when unrolling. The liberties you took with your pseudocode above prove the point: as others have noted, you've chosen premature optimization over using a fitting data type. The first could be easily fixed before release. The latter is harder.