> It is critical that people question “how does this magic actually work?” No. It's critical that people question “why do I have to rely on magic?” in the firs

> It is critical that people question “how does this magic actually work?” No. It's critical that people question “why do I have to rely on magic?” in the first place. Even in high-level languages, perhaps especially in high-level languages, it's a good idea to write straightforward code. > there is an appalling lack of candy in the C/C++ ecosystem (...) performance isn’t hidden C and C++ are very different languages, and there is no shortage of C++ libraries full of incomprehensible magic. When debugging template-heavy C++ code, it can be very hard to determine where expensive and unnecessary object copies are created. Thank you C++, for making copy construction implicit! > Are you producing too much garbage unnecessarily? The high-level programmer's best defense against creating too much garbage is programming with values (whose redundant representations in memory can be automatically deduplicated by the runtime system) rather than object identities. > Are your dictionaries too big to the point of being inefficient? The problem isn't the dictionary abstraction, but rather the implementor's choice of underlying data structure. If you have a really big dictionary whose keys are strings (a common use case), you want tries, not hashtables. > string concats can be replaced by string builders in the same amount of lines, Using string builders is a low-level chore, and defeats the point to using a high-level language. A better alternative is using a persistent list/string data structure that actually supports efficient concatenation. > Does your program start ad-hoc threads? Use a threadpool with fixed size. Again, too low-level. A programmer working with a high-level language should be able to spawn as many green threads as she wants to, and let the language's runtime system handle multiplexing those green threads over OS threads. > Unless you are 100% sure the lines are always of reasonable size, do not use readline. This is terrible advice. If readline is causing you problems, you are using the wrong string data structure. --- Okay, I'm done bashing what could be bashed. The last two items in the OP are actually good.