Mike Acton on Data Oriented Design and C++, CPPCON 2014

This man is my hero. It takes a lot of guts to stand before the audience of C++ experts (many, if not most, of whom are proud Boost developers) and say “meh” to the use of templates, exceptions, virtual methods, and generally praising C for its lack of gap between the program and the computer. His main idea I so agree with is that the programmer must understand how the CPU would execute the program, what instructions this line of code translates into, etc. Abstract and generalized solutions stand in the way of that, killing performance and hindering the ability to reason about the program.