If you or your friend are really paranoid about performance, then go read the Intel manuals on optimization. Fun.
Otherwise, go for correctness, reliability and maintainability every time. I'd rather have a game that ran a bit slowly than one that crashed. If/when you notice that you have performance issues, PROFILE and then optimize. You will likely find that theres some hotspot piece of code which can possibly be made more efficient by using a more efficient data structure or algorithm. Only bother about these silly little mico-optimization when profiling shows that they're the only way you can get a worthwhile speedup.
So:
- Write code to be clear and correct
- Profile
- PROFILE
- Can you use more efficient data structures or algorithms to speed up the bottleneck?
- Use micro-optimizations as a last resort and only where profiling showed it would help
PS: A lot of modern C++ compilers provide an exception handling mechanism which adds zero execution overhead UNLESS an exception is thrown. That is, performance is only reduced when an exception is actually thrown. As long as exceptions are only used for exceptional circumstances, then theres no good reason not to use them.
