In C++, am I paying for what I am not eating?

Question

Let\'s consider the following hello world examples in C and C++:

main.c

#include 

int main()
{
    printf(\"Hello world\\n\");
    r         


        

Answer 1

While the existing technical answers are correct, I think that the question ultimately stems from this misconception:

It is famous that in C++ you pay for what you eat.

This is just marketing talk from the C++ community. (To be fair, there's marketing talk in every language community.) It doesn't mean anything concrete that you can seriously depend on.

"You pay for what you use" is supposed to mean that a C++ feature only has overhead if you're using that feature. But the definition of "a feature" is not infinitely granular. Often you will end up activating features that have multiple aspects, and even though you only need a subset of those aspects, it's often not practical or possible for the implementation to bring the feature in partially.

In general, many (though arguably not all) languages strive to be efficient, with varying degrees of success. C++ is somewhere on the scale, but there is nothing special or magical about its design that would allow it to be perfectly successful in this goal.