Fuzz and strings

There is a weird dumbbell curve where efficiency matters a lot for small battery powered systems decreasing as battery power increases, very little for single-user desktops and high powered servers, and then very much again in large environments with consolidation and virtualization.

My co-worker has a funny story from when they managed a team in the late '90s, a developer wanted to write software in a high-level language like C++ or something to save half the time and their response was that even if the developer saved half the time, but the thousands of deployed systems required a ram upgrade of $1k each that this would pay for a developer several times over to make the software more efficient and they don't have time or money to do re-work or deploy upgrades so please just make it efficient the first time though kthxbye.