>Those kinds of layers are both expensive AND beatable, regardless of the "optimizing compiler". No - those layers were invented because those things were such

>Those kinds of layers are both expensive AND beatable, regardless of the "optimizing compiler". No - those layers were invented because those things were such common errors - ie. - most people got them wrong. So nope, most people aren't able to beat those in everyday code, and debugging is expensive. Performance is not the only metric, even in games, and you have to "beat" the other metrics as well - such as bug count/correctness and productivity. Maybe when you have AAA titles and can budget a few millions on dev team alone the equation looks different, and that's why I singled them out. But for small teams (mobile) and indies/amateurs .NET is good enough (and is being used). And games regularly sacrifice performance for productivity, look up early unreal script (interpreted), and how it was often the bottle neck but was still used in development.