Best practices and recommendations

You surely know the following famous quote from Donald Knuth, which is attributed to Tony Hoare:

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."

The sense of the quote is that you should avoid writing obfuscated, unreadable, and error-prone code in order to gain an insignificant performance advantage, because the most important performance gain will be achieved only in 3 percent of your code. However, you should take precautions to not lose the opportunity to improve performance in that critical percentage.

In this section, we will talk about those precautions; we will see some ...

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