There is a simple but often overlooked technique to optimize performance-sensitive code: merging (or manually inlining) functions. We often build series of low-level functions that execute various computations that we then combine to perform higher-level tasks. When taken in isolation, each of those functions does exactly what it should and might even be perfectly optimized. However, when a series of thosefunctions work together, unnecessary or duplicated work might appear. Let’s look at a...