If you think that they might be slower, but don't know, then that tells me you haven't benchmarked it. Furthermore, you probably haven't profiled the code to see if it's even worth bothering to try to find a speed-up in that area. Until you know that you have a speed problem to solve, and that the
s are the problem, you shouldn't consider removing them to make stuff faster. Only consider removing them to make the code easier to read.