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

While the answer is technically "yes", the practical answer is NO. It's true that the compiler can, under certain circumstances, perform code optimizations by taking into account that a given value cannot change or that a method will not modify the owning object. However, these will be situational cases and so incredibly far down in the weeds of optimization that it would almost certainly be a mistake to take it into account up front.