I think we are talking about different optimizations here. I'm referring to "think and use qsort over bubblesort" kind of thing while you seem to be referring t

I think we are talking about different optimizations here. I'm referring to "think and use qsort over bubblesort" kind of thing while you seem to be referring to a hand-tuned inline assembly optimizations. My point is that the "hardware can handle it" mantra is a tell-tale site of a developer who is more concerned with his own comforts than anything else. It's someone who's content with not pushing himself and that's just wrong. -- (edit) While I'm here, do you know how to get an uptime on Linux? cat /proc/uptime Do you know how to get uptime on Windows? WMI. That's just absolutely f#cking insane that I need to initialize COM, instantiate an object, grant it required privileges, set up a proxy impersonation only to allow me send an RPC request to a system service (that may or may not be running, in which case it will take 3-5 seconds to start) that would on my behalf talk to something else in Windows guts and then reply with a COM variant containing an answer. So that's several megs of memory, 3-4 non-trivial external dependencies and a second of run-time to get the uptime. Can you guess why I bring this up? Because that's exactly a kind of mess that spawns from "oh, it's not a big overhead" assumption. Little by little crap accumulates, solidifies and you end up with this massive pile of shitty negligent code that is impossible to improve or refactor. All because of that one little assumption.