Thanks to John for having picked up quite an interesting dicussion on Sitepointforums contrasting various performance gains possible (in this case, in a code library) as a result of certain design decisions.
How can a larger code base lead to faster development, how can longer, more complex algorithms be faster? Here follow a few quotes from the discussion which stretches 61 pages cut & pasted into a word processor (almost 17k words) if you don’t have the time to read it all 😉