Zero cost abstractions are cool
There is a language design principle in C++ that you should only pay for what you use; that is, that the language should not be doing "extra work" which is not needed for what you are trying to do. Often this is extrapolated by developers to imply building "simple" code, and only using relatively primitive data structures, to avoid possible runtime penalties from using more advanced structures and methodologies. However, in many cases, you can get a lot of benefits by using so-called "zero cost abstractions", which are designed to be "free" at runtime (they are not entirely zero cost; I'll cover the nuance in an addendum). These are cool, imho, and I'm going to give an example of why I think so. Consider a very simple, and somewhat ubiquitous in code from less experienced developers, function result paradigm of returning a boolean to indicate success or failure: bool DoSomething(); This works, obviously, and fairly unambiguo...