I feel like he is missing the boat here. C++ is on a path to dying as a language because of a lack of safety features, and he’s talking about zero cost abstractions. Exceptions cause massive compiler issues and are hardly zero cost anyway, I don’t know how he can compare them at all to std::expected. Also anyone who has worked in an exception heavy codebase can attest to the fact that they do not lead to simpler code.

I have worked with C++ almost every day for a decade now, and I’ll be sad to see it go. This is not what the thought leaders should be focusing on at all. If you’re unhappy with std:: expected just don’t use it? Why can’t we focus on fixing the thousands of security vulnerabilities that cause real harm and money and endless developer time to try to work around.

I agree that we need better performance testing but I tend to see it as a top-down or an operations-in problem. Performance work from the bottom up, from low-level code constructs seems like the kind of work I've seen XKCD or even Dilbert cartoons about. That is the path of premature optimization and bike shedding.

I'd love to see the industry do some kind of compositional service-level perf work. I'd love something like a contract testing view or perf, so that I can see how changes in a single part of the system will affect over-all SLAs. The tooling we have now seems to be of the form where if we want system perf, we need the big, expensive, kludgy full systems running for perf tests. And that kind of thing slows down dev velocity.

I hope someone from SmartBear reads this is knows the right tech to acquire to accomplish this (give me Pact/PactFlow but for perf!).