[marginalia_nu]

Dunno, it's not unheard of for a program to do the same thing over and over again, sometimes millions of times. Every slow program consists of a bunch of individually fast instructions.

[zaphar]

If your hot loop is doing configuration setup then your code has bigger problems than this particular pattern.

[marginalia_nu]

You could also be configuring many things.

[saturn_vk]

Indeed, but you should probably do that right before looping

[marginalia_nu]

Right, but if you needed to configure a million different things, wouldn't you also loop the configuration process?