The price of performance optimization

So, everything is rosy? Well, not quite, as there's a dark side to performance optimization too. If we'll try to squeeze the last drops of performance from our hardware, we can end up having unreadable, inflexible, unmaintainable, and hence outright ugly, code!

So, be aware that there are caveats and that there's a price to be paid. We must decide whether we want to pay it, and at what point we'll stop the optimization to save the clarity of our code.