It all depends on what you are doing. I do embedded with strict realtime requirements. CPU pinning would not be an option. I have also done software that should use as little resources as possible (but still be quick) to coexist with other software on the same hardware.

All of these are different, valid, meanings of high performance. You need context. An interactive IDE is yet another thing that needs to be high performance in yet another way.

Spinning is covered in the article.