So no matter how pretty your code, eventually someone will benchmark it and demand top performance. Squeezing microseconds is a very addictive and even destructive activity. It ruins your evenings, destroys your ability to converse with human beings and typically leaves your code in a mess. No programmer can escape it however: the world demands speed, or a somewhat equivalent modern measure, longer battery life. Squeezing out more performance is not just a matter of “writing better code”.