[Jodavaho.io]

I regret to inform you that member initialization lists will not make your program noticeably faster.

The point of this post is to vent, so it is highly opinionated.

• Style-based performance optimizations are a waste of time
• Good fundamentals are more important than micro-optimizations
• Compile and test times are vastly underrated
• For some reason, code / function generalization is valued higher than ergonomics or real performance.

I form this opinion based on experiences with:

• The near-constant debate over style, move semantics, constructor initialization lists, and other micro-optimizations
• Making small changes and seeing large performance gains, sometimes 1,000-100,000x by:
  • Using hardware more efficiently
  • Reframing the core problem
  • Using the right data structures
  • Using the right algorithms

In short, if you’re worried about the performance problems with initialize+copy vs std::move, you’re either doing something very wrong or you’re down to the last 0.1% of performance improvements.