Both of you talk as if generally, people never worry about such things. It seems unusual to me. Is it because the first language I learned was 65816 assembler?
People never worry about machine-level micro-optimizations in exactly the same that people never worry about MVC web app frameworks, which is to say "most people almost never" for some appropriate metric for "most" and "almost". It's a niche. My point was just that some people are happy in just one, while others (the poster I was replying to, and myself among them) aren't.
In domains where fine-grained performance is not paramount (i.e. most programs), no, people don't worry about that sort of thing very much. How do you even go about reasoning on cache lines in a Ruby on Rails app?
