The harder it is to refactor code or change underlying data structures, the more likely you are to be stuck with optimisation that was 100% necessary for performance goals 10-20 years ago but is now the cause of bottlenecks.

I think this is getting at something general: even if optimization is local and not a property of major design decisions, having general good design makes it much easier to do these local optimizations. As another general phenomenon: often optimizations make code more complicated, and you need to offset that by having good control of complexity.

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