Honestly in many cases you can have your cake and eat it too if you just write in a functional or data-flow style rather than a rigorous OO style. Since this is

Honestly in many cases you can have your cake and eat it too if you just write in a functional or data-flow style rather than a rigorous OO style. Since this is C++, using std::algorithm or another algorithms library would let you abstract your implementation details while relying on the compiler's ability to optimise/vectorise/inline code as needed. This applies doubly so if you can rely on templates & structural typing to push your polymorphism to compile time. clang & gcc are surprisingly good at optimisation as long when you don't have to bounce off a vtable and code is clean / avoids "manual optimisation". Also while I'm not saying I don't believe the author here, I wish they would have used https://quick-bench.com/ https://quick-bench.com/ or https://godbolt.org/ https://godbolt.org/ so that readers could trivially verify the results & methodology.