Comment by jjuhl

Yeah. const_cast (and C-style casts) and mutable existing in the language make const pretty useless to the optimizer. But at least they are trying to get some benefit from it in some cases. A C++ variant (compiler flag) that would remove const_cast, mutable and the cast-const-away parts of C-style casts from the language and allow the optimizer to put more value into 'const' could be interresting.