Should we still be optimizing “in the small”?

Question

I was changing my for loop to increment using ++i instead of i++ and got to thinking, is this really necessary anymore? Surely today\'s compilers

Answer 1

Those optimizations are still relevant. Regarding your example, using ++i or i++ on a built-in arithmetic type has no effect.

In case of user defined increment/decrement operators, ++i is preferable, because it doesn't imply copying the incremented object.

So a good coding style is to use prefix increment/decrement in for loops.