Program Design

Well-structured programs are easier to optimize than poorly-structured ones. If we grow a program as a collection of functions, refactoring along the way, we will be able to change those functions more or less independently of one another to try out new ideas. As is almost always the case, improving the quality of our work improves our performance: it is the opposite of an either/or tradeoff. In addition, choosing the right algorithms and data structures often yields bigger speedups than switching to parallel hardware, so we should always look there first for performance gains.