Fair enough, I do love being contrarian

I think you missed the whole point of my comment 😂. Regardless, the time spent compiling a small snippet of code is completely negligible. In the end, both #if 0 and if (false) have their complimentary uses.

The problem is everyone disagrees on what part of C++ is good… Some like C+classes. Some like intense meta programming and some like functional programming and all are valid C++ that people advocate for.

If (false) is good because it is compiled so it doesn’t get stale.

Atomic instructions are quite slow and if they run a lot… Rust has two types of reference counted pointer for that reason. One that has atomic reference counting for multithreaded code and one non-atomic for single threaded. Reference counting is usually overkill in the first place and can be a sign that your code doesn’t have proper ownership.