This reminds me of the (clearly) apocryphal story of the 1980s programmer that would start every program with

int main() {
    int i;
    for ( i=0; i < 1000000; i++) {}

… and any time the program was going too slow, you just took a zero out!

I’d definitely be interested in hearing more about developing in extremely resource constrained environments. James Hague has some posts that touch on some of these thoughts:

http://prog21.dadgum.com/201.html

http://prog21.dadgum.com/187.html

(really just read any of his posts, they’re all neat)

It would seem to me that most of these issues could be “mitigated” with a binary AoP system to insert pointcuts into the engine code.