Why should I code in C++ idioms if it has significant downsides? An example is I wrote a varadic template for a GC allocation interface: T1* obj1 = Alloc<

Why should I code in C++ idioms if it has significant downsides? An example is I wrote a varadic template for a GC allocation interface: T1* obj1 = Alloc<T1>(arg1) T2* obj2 = Alloc<T2>(arg2, arg3) However because I have so many fine-grained types, this seems to takes up 10% of the VM size of the program! https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.12.5/pub/metrics.wwz/oil-native/overview.txt https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.12.5/pub/metrics.wwz/oil-... The total vmsize is 1217792 and the 2 Alloc<> entries are about 10% of that. So my conclusion is that it would have been better to use a macro all along, which would look something like: T1* obj1 = ALLOC(T1, arg1) T2* obj2 = ALLOC(T2, arg2, arg3) This will expand to something like: T1* obj1 = new (gHeap.Allocate(sizeof(T1)) (arg1) That is, it uses placement new to constructs the object inside a GC'd heap. ----- I don't believe the C++ idiom is any faster, and it makes the code larger (and potentially slower). Am I missing something? I think the issue is that the monomorphization happens for each T and not for each sizeof(T), and even doing it on sizeof(T) is not really necessary for fast code. Oil has more fine-grained and ML-style strong types than any other shell implementation, via ASDL and C++. So I try to take advantage of additional type safety. But sometimes it's not worth it. I suspect the macro is better here. It will be somewhat annoying to change all the code, but probably worth it.