(2) Even reducing it to runtime costs, it seems a bit nonsensical. Are C++ exceptions a zero cost abstraction? All the googlers I argued with about them would insist that they have unacceptably high runtime costs.
OK, but templates are surely zero (runtime) cost abstractions, right? Unless you start to worry about duplicate code blowing out your instruction cache but if that's a problem, no profiler in the world will ever be able to tell you, so I guess you'll never know just how costly the abstraction is, so you might as well continue believing it is zero...?
(2) Even reducing it to runtime costs, it seems a bit nonsensical. Are C++ exceptions a zero cost abstraction? All the googlers I argued with about them would insist that they have unacceptably high runtime costs.
OK, but templates are surely zero (runtime) cost abstractions, right? Unless you start to worry about duplicate code blowing out your instruction cache but if that's a problem, no profiler in the world will ever be able to tell you, so I guess you'll never know just how costly the abstraction is, so you might as well continue believing it is zero...?