Does declaring C++ variables const help or hurt performance?

Question

I understand the behavior of const-qualified data types. I am curious, though, if there is any performance gain or loss from over- or under-zealousness of quali

Answer 1

const is mainly a compile-time thing, however, declaring something as const sometimes allows for certain optimizations. If the code in question isn't a performance bottleneck, I wouldn't worry about it and just use const as intended: to produce clearer code and prevent yourself from doing stupid things.