Let's take a look at some common areas of performance problems and see whether they matter or not. We will also learn why we often miss these issues during development. We will look at programming language choice, latency, bandwidth, computation, and when you should consider performance.
People often focus on the speed of the programming language that is used. However, this often misses the point. This is a very simplistic view that glosses over the nuances of technology choices. It is easy to write slow software in any language.
With the huge amounts of processing speed that is available today, relatively slow interpreted languages can often be fast enough and the increase in development speed is worth it. It is important to understand the arguments and the trade-offs involved, even if after reading this book you decide to use C# and .NET.
The way to write the fastest software is to get down to the metal and write in assembly language...