There is no such tension inherently, yet I have seen a lot of violations of good practices in the name of "more performance". C# might be slower than C++, yes,

There is no such tension inherently, yet I have seen a lot of violations of good practices in the name of "more performance". C# might be slower than C++, yes, but the question is: is it fast enough for what I would like to do? The fact that it is garbage collected and doesn't require pointer syntax makes it nicer to use, yet it runs slower. I have made similar experiences with databases, normalization is often discarded due to performance concerns (woohoo, too manz joins). It is true, making a join is slower than not making it, but the performance is gained by having less redundancy checks (I know, I am oversimplifying this). I am just very tired of seeing performance as an infinite target for optimization at the cost of maintainabilty, readability and so on. Exaggeratingly I could state: If you want it REALLY fast, write it in assembly. Do you see what I mean?