> The only super legit argument I've heard in favor of _not_ using templates or avoiding them in general is because of the code generation bloat And even then,

> The only super legit argument I've heard in favor of _not_ using templates or avoiding them in general is because of the code generation bloat And even then, it's important to recognize that bloat is a relative measure. If you use just one instantiation of a template, you're not paying for multiple versions of the code. If, on the other hand, you use multiple instantiations, the code will be bloated compared to, say, a single type-erased version— but will not be any bigger than if you had written several "instantiations" of the same code by hand. There's a tradeoff to be made, too, since a statically-typed version of a function will probably be faster than a type-erased version. Anyway, w.r.t. bloat, templates aren't the problem; static polymorphism is (can be). Templates are just a way of implementing static polymorphism.