I mean, you have to load the instructions, too. That being said those have pretty intelligent pre-fetching baked in, but if it's the computational bottleneck, y

I mean, you have to load the instructions, too. That being said those have pretty intelligent pre-fetching baked in, but if it's the computational bottleneck, you can get the values into registers for the lookup. I'm not sure this post is meant to be a model for good implementation advice, though, performance-oriented or otherwise. Just an interesting tidbit. EDIT: I'm trying to figure out how to write code using registers instead of indexes into memory and it ends up with lots of conditionals instead of basically one instruction. The conversation about speed is... tricky. Can some people who are more expert help out?