LINQ's performance

The reason I love LINQ is that it can make me think in a  mathematical way. For some reason, I always doubt the FOR loop and IF condition makes a program buggy. I do not have the number to say most of the bug is from FOR loop or IF condition, but at least a world only with sequential statement seems easier for my brain.

For the performance point of view, LINQ is not perfect. When compare LINQ with simple for loop, the loser is always LINQ. Maybe the problem is too simple?

        public static void A()
        {
            var a = Enumerable.Range(1, 1000);
            var b = Enumerable.Range(1, 1000);
            var r = 0;
            var count = a.Count();
            for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
                r += (a.ElementAt(i) + b.ElementAt(i));
        }

        public static void B()
        {
            var a = Enumerable.Range(1, 1000);
            var b = Enumerable.Range(1, 1000);
            var r = a.Zip(b, (x, y) => x + y).Sum();
        }

A=50109 B=10628

I got two IEnumerable. The for loop is slower than LINQ and not that easy to understand (at least for me). ElementAt()  is the culprit which makes the A 5 times slower than B. I can convert it to a List and without ElementAt(), A is still still faster than B, but it needs more memory to hold the List.


Do I have a conclusion? Unfortunately, NO. For a quick prototype, LINQ is perfect, but for performance critical hot path, I guess a FOR loop is still the inevitable.