> Re: last paragraph, I agree; however, it's a cost / benefit thing. Performance optimization is most definitely a cost/benefit trade off thing. In your busin

> Re: last paragraph, I agree; however, it's a cost / benefit thing. Performance optimization is most definitely a cost/benefit trade off thing. In your business as a consultant, it will almost never make sense to optimize for performance. On the other hand, in my business (sw engineering for the semiconductor industry), performance and power consumption are some of the primary criteria our customers (consumer product manufacturers) make the choice between our product and our competitor's product. In our case, performance is a feature (if not the feature). Most software engineers probably fall in to the former category and do not have to care about performance of the software they write. But it is dangerous to think that it would always be the case, and especially harmful to think that educational articles like the OP are wasted programmer time. Especially given that OP seems to be focused in low level operating system development, and who wouldn't want their operating systems, browsers, etc faster.