> Which reminds me, how many people in "the real world" actually profile their programs? I bet a lot of performance gains could be found that way in any languag

> Which reminds me, how many people in "the real world" actually profile their programs? I bet a lot of performance gains could be found that way in any language. Not enough, I'd say. Particularly since just scrutinizing the first few things a profiler catches can make a tremendous difference. For example, in an hour of profiling and tuning a project of mine, I fixed two hotspots that each led to an independent 20x speedup. 400x total. Half the runtime is just disk IO now.