<i>What&#x27;s interesting is Stroustrup proudly states that C++ provides &quot;cost-free abstractions&quot;. I&#x27;m not too familiar with C++ implementations; is it fair to say that?</i><p>C++ was invented when efficiency was measured in instruction counts and processor cycles, so he optimized his language in those terms.<p>Processors are much more complicated now, and cache alignment and branch prediction and pipelining are much more important for efficiency than counting the number of instructions something takes.