[cbetti]

In 2010 Endeca's analytics engine exe was growing substantially via introduction of template instantiations. The engine eventually crossed the threshold of instruction cache misses outweighing the benefits of avoiding type lookups at runtime, and the team agreed to stop pursuing template instantiation so aggressively as a performance enhancement.

I wonder if modern compilers would have allowed the team to keep at it.

It's been a while, but if I recall correctly, the optimized, stripped exe's at the time were a bit under 100mb. >500mb with debug symbols, etc.