Comment by jblow

In many performance-programming situations you are subject to constraints that prevent use of a general solution or else makes use of a general solution massively inefficient.

For example, your data structure is on the GPU and your data is in a texture in a certain specific format because of other reasons.

If you wrote the above reply without considering this kind of case, it probably means you haven't been exposed to very much of this kind of case ... ... which was my original point.