Because Paul Graham woke up this morning and said, "news.yc is 50% faster. And Paul looked upon the site and saw that it was Good"
The pages load for pg before he even clicks the links.
I changed some things about the way Arc handles strings.
Do I detect premature optimization?
Arc is a language implementation, not an application.
Optimization of language implementations is arguably never premature. When such an optimization translates to an application speedup, it's indisputably not premature.
"Premature optimization" has become a mantra for not thinking about performance at all. If users notice it, it's not premature.