I was looking at some code the other day that does string concatenation with StringCchPrintf(“%s%s”). I can imagine how this would have near optimal performance, and a hopeful developer could easily assume that in fact it has been tuned for this kind...

… like a water snake. Which is why we measure, measure and measure again. Even the most obvious rule of thumb can be wrong. I was optimizing some string parsing code (which is almost always ripe for optimization), and trying to reduce the cost of traversing...