Right, but pretty often the payment is not obvious. For example, it's often shocking how many non-obvious wasteful copies are being made behind the scenes as ou

Right, but pretty often the payment is not obvious. For example, it's often shocking how many non-obvious wasteful copies are being made behind the scenes as output to relatively innocent looking code. That's of course "programmer's fault", not denying that. So you end up paying for things you didn't intend to use, but used anyways because of some small detail. Sometimes I feel like the only way to write good C++ is to keep looking at the disassembler output... C++ is my dayjob.