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I've seen more performance problems caused by people not having clean code than I ever have from people not thinking about performance from the get go.

I've also seen plenty of performance issues ironically caused by performance hacks wedged in early on.

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You will often find clean code and fast code converge on very similar places. It is often a false dichotomy to think code needs to be either clean OR fast.

Now this does break down, if you need to get to the point where you are bit twiddling, it is not going to be clean as using something higher level.. but you can often put the nasty parts in a static method somewhere and still have the code be very easy to read.

this reminds me of the post about the jvm code cache a few days ago where if they had left the jvm to optimize the code cache by itself, the would not have ended up with the problem situation where the had to spend time to figure it out their optimization was the cause of the problem.

-- sorry for the run on sentence.

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