We address the challenge of parallelization development of industrial high-performance inspection systems comparing a conventional parallelization approach versus an auto-parallelized technique. Therefore, we introduce the functional array processing language Single Assignment C (SAC), which relies on a hardware virtualization concept for automated, parallel machine code generation for multi-core CPUs and GPUs. Additional software engineering aspects like programmability, productivity, understandability, maintainability, and resulting achieved gain in performance are discussed from the point of view of a developer. With several illustrative benchmarking examples from the field of image processing and machine learning, the relationship between runtime performance and efficiency of development is analyzed.