In Switzerland there is now again the idea to build nuclear plants, by some (I'm pretty sure the political party that initiated this gets a lot of money from the nuclear lobby - unfortunately the money flow is intransparent in Switzerland.) A recent study in Switzerland [1] has shown nuclear plant are not competitive with solar, wind, hydro, and batteries, not even taking into account that accidents are not fully insured.

[1] https://www.20min.ch/story/akw-debatte-neue-atomkraftwerke-l...

> document and express intent clearly

Arguably, the void* does that as well?

> Any seasoned C++ developer seeing this knows what this reinterpret_cast means.

Same for void*?

> it's a bit more text to read

If you have to call it many times, this adds up.

> Some might also say it complexifies and uglifies the code

I think the point is that it adds security, which the other options don't. And, it doesn't add complexity on the caller, but only at one place: the implementation.

> makes it non-portable on top of that.

This can be solved.

That, I fully understand. I think many developers are productive in one language: in the one that they know best. Which is probably the one they use most. It might happen that this is is a "fast" language by accident (like Java or Go), or a language like Python. And then there is never enough reason to switch.

> "Most engineers would kill for a 5% speedup"

I think this is very rare - maybe a heavily used app in Facebook or Google, where 5% could mean a lot of money. But a factor of 10 speedup is much more common (and possible sometimes).

> there is an allure to performance optimization due to the fact that it can be so easily quantified.

That's true. I also think simplicity is quantifiable, and so my personal hobby is to write something impressive in few lines. Like a chess engine, QR code reader, editor, data compression tool, compiler, in 500 lines. But this is mostly for hobbies I guess. For work, it's mostly about features, and then performance, I guess.

If you do have a UUID collision, chances are extremely high that it's either a software bug, or glitch in the computer. It could be a cosmic ray. Cosmic rays messing with the computer memory or CPU are actually relatively common.

For my own soft-floating point math library, I expect the value is off by a some percentage, not just off by epsilon. And so I have my own almostSame method [1] which accounts for that and is quite a bit more complex. Actually multiple such methods. But well, that's just my own use case.

[1] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/blob/main/src/test...

But don't think that necessarily means we are in a Many-Worlds. I rather think that we don't have enough knowledge in this area. Assuming we live in a simulation, an alternative explanation would be, that unlikely branches are not further simulated to save energy. And in this case, superposition is just branch prediction :-)

I assume the following happens: while a (small) subsystem is in "pure state" (in quantum coherence), no information flows out of this subsystem. Then, when measuring, information flows out and other information flows in, which disturbs the pure state. This collapses of the wave function (quantum decoherence). For all practical purposes, it looks like quantum decoherence is irreversible, but technically this could still be reversible; it's just that the subsystem (that is in coherence) got much, much larger. Sure, for all practical purposes it's then irreversible, but for us most of physics anyway looks irreversible (eg. black holes).

[1] https://topps.diku.dk/pirc/?id=janusP

Maybe you meant sorting. You can implement sorting algorithms, as long as you store the information which entries were swapped. (To "unsort" the entries when running in reverse). So, an array that is already sorted doesn't need much additional information; one that is unsorted will require a lot of "undo" space. I think this is the easiest example to see the relation between reversible computing and thermodynamics: in thermodynamics, to bring "order" to a system requires "unorder" (heat) somewhere else.

There are also examples for encryption / decryption, but I find compression and sorting more interesting.

[1] https://topps.diku.dk/pirc/?id=janusP

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(time-reversible_computi...