Forgive me here if I'm being argumentative, but I think we're both speculating. Someone further up the chain mentioned this sort of deduplication might be done

Forgive me here if I'm being argumentative, but I think we're both speculating. Someone further up the chain mentioned this sort of deduplication might be done by the linker, but the code for the duplicated type would still exist in the binary before linking.. An old but probably negligible complaint about C++ is that it creates larger binaries than if one were writing C. I think this is something overlooked because C++ has a focus on type strictness - perhaps the linker has a better way of seeing through abstractions.. I've identified where I think a problem lies.. now I just have to find proof it :3 Unrelated: I wonder if identical libraries that exist in separate filesystem trees (like in Docker) are deduped in memory, or if it's done by inode.