CppCon 2019: Chandler Carruth “There Are No Zero-cost Abstractions”

Why HN readers recommended it

HN commenters cite it whenever zero-cost abstraction claims come up, especially for why unique_ptr is not free on some ABIs.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

CppCon

Topic

c++ abstraction costs

Format

talk

Level

advanced

HN recommenders in dataset

7

HN mentions in dataset

20

Recommendation years in dataset

2020–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Yes, tech talks don't need to be boring and I agree on many points on the post. But also not just 12 slides, more like hundreds of slides. One example I have is Chandler Carruths talk in CppCon 2019 "There Are No Zero-cost Abstrations" [VIDEO] …

• The non-destructiveness of move semantics in C++ is very annoying. It causes for example `std::unique_ptr` to not be a zero-cost abstraction in all cases. See [VIDEO] for a nice expose on this.

• With the caveat that I am NOT suggesting this justifies choosing C over C++, I just wanted to mention this talk about how "zero-cost abstraction" is an idealism, not necessarily a reality: [VIDEO] That said, I tried to reproduce something similar, and it seems the …