Many times it is to get the performance improvements you think you should need, but actually never will.<p>Having been coding since the days of Assembly being a normal language for business applications, I never seen a programming community so obsessed with micro-optimizations per code line, (without using profilers, because programmer knows best), like the C one.<p>And by correlation the C sub-communities from C++ and Objective-C ones.<p>Other communities think first into getting their data-structures and algorithms right, use the profiler and then optimize.