[tialaramex]

> It should be blindingly obvious that /performance/ is table stakes.

Nah, there's a famous WG21 (the C++ committee) paper named "ABI: Now or Never" which lays out just some of the ever growing performance cost of choices the committee has made to preserve ABI and explains that if this cost is to be considered a price paid for something the committee needs to pick "Never" and if they instead want to stop paying the price they need to pick "Now" and, if as the author suspects, they don't actually care, they should pick neither and C++ should be considered obsolete.

The committee, of course, picked neither, and lots of people who were there have since defended this claiming that this was a false dilemma - they were actually cleverly picking "Later" which that author didn't offer. Each time they've repeated this more time has passed yet they're still no closer to this "Later" ...