I’m writing code with very stringent performance characteristics, and it’s a string validation routine. One part is a short-cut that kicks in if we might potentially be looking at a JSON object or JSON array. I’d written

var mightBeJson = value.StartsWith("{") || value.StartsWith("[")) {

as a short-cut. Turned out that since this is almost the first thing that happened in the code, this made a massive, terrible hit on performance. Switching to treating the string as a char array makes a massive difference;

 var mightBeJson = value[0] == '[' || value[0] == '{';

Night and day difference!

Takeaway — never compare single-character strings like “X” when you can compare chars like ‘X’ directly.