Exactly. Spending programmer time to gain some marginal improvement in CPU cycle efficiency is almost always a bad call, except when that code is going to run o

Exactly. Spending programmer time to gain some marginal improvement in CPU cycle efficiency is almost always a bad call, except when that code is going to run on a GAJILLION CPUs all of which use a lot of electricity etc. I still think that this is only the case for a tiny fraction of all the code out there (Java is f*ing fast these days), and will become less and less true with each passing year.