Optimize!
So, if your program is too slow, probably a good place to start is to tell the compiler to optimize it.
Who’da thunk it?
I have a friend who is working on a pretty nifty program to analyze spatial data, and build a minimum spanning tree from it. His program was running slow, so he wanted to try it on my computer. You can imagine he was pretty shocked when my result was nearly 70% faster. And I only typed a few extra characters!
Thanks, compiler! You’re my hero.