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This is a page about the elusive subject of program performance optimization. Before you proceed towards such lofty goals, you should examine your reasons for doing so. Optimization is but one of many desirable goals in software engineering, and is often antagonistic to other important goals such as stability, maintainability, and portability. At its most cursory level (efficient implementation, clean non-redundant interfaces) optimization is beneficial and should always be applied. But at its most intrusive (inline assembly, pre-compiled/self-modified code, loop unrolling, bit-fielding, superscalar and vectorizing) it can be an unending source of time consuming implementation and bug hunting. Be cautious and wary of the cost of optimizing your code.