One interesting thing I have learned recently is that GCC can do inlining through function pointers. That doesn't make your point about dedicated function bei

One interesting thing I have learned recently is that GCC can do inlining through function pointers. That doesn't make your point about dedicated function being better idea for performance but it's one thing "std::sort is faster by design" people often miss. From GCC documentation: >>-findirect-inlining Inline also indirect calls that are discovered to be known at compile time thanks to previous inlining. This option has any effect only when inlining itself is turned on by the -finline-functions or -finline-small-functions options. Enabled at level -O2.