Jelle Druyts

Rory nails it: optimization is not always a good thing. On today's CPU's, performance is only critical when an actual performance issue stands up, bites you in the knees and gives your grandmother a bad haircut. Hardcore low-level optimizations are a remnant of times when counting bytes actually mattered and everybody worthy of the title 'programmer' could do a 16 bit multiplication with overflow checking in their heads in under a minute. Reversing a string these days... please. Perf hits in today's distributed world linger in network connections, databases and I/O, most of the time not anywhere inside your box unless you're really cranking numbers to achieve world peace. (Modest exaggeration.)

I'm not saying you can't have performance issues in your code - duh - I'm just totally agreeing with Rory that you shouldn't waste your precious time on anticipating them. Furthermore, compilers and runtimes are way smarter these days and can sometimes optimize parts of your code a lot better than you ever could.

By the way, why would you want to reverse a string anyway? (Well except when you run elgooG of course.)