[brianwawok]

You will often find clean code and fast code converge on very similar places. It is often a false dichotomy to think code needs to be either clean OR fast.

Now this does break down, if you need to get to the point where you are bit twiddling, it is not going to be clean as using something higher level.. but you can often put the nasty parts in a static method somewhere and still have the code be very easy to read.