This is because average programs are things like Office etc. Which people expect to take a wee bit to open/edit and so on. I hate that expectation! I remember opening docs in Windows 3.1 and they were FAST. Now there is so much bloat, both in MS Office, and Word documents for example, that it takes ages (relatively speaking)

Running OpenOffice on Linux is better, less bloat......(oops, ranting again, where was I?)

Oh yes, low power or high performance apps - this is when efficient code becomes essential...even though gamers buy zippy machines, there is good impetus for games coders to do this right, and for small embedded apps there is often no other way.

And surely the comments live in the source code...not necessarily in the compiled app.!