Benefits and drawbacks of metaprogramming

After our discussion about template metaprogramming, the following are the advantages we derive:

• Template metaprogramming has no side effect since it is immutable, so we cannot modify an existing type
• There is better code readability compared to code that does not implement metaprogramming
• It reduces repetition of the code

Although we can gain benefits from template metaprogramming, there are several disadvantages, which are as follows:

• The syntax is quite complex.
• The compilation time takes longer since we now execute code during compile-time.
• The compiler can optimize the generated code much better and perform inlining, for instance, the C qsort() function and the C++ sort template. In C, the qsort() function takes a pointer to a comparison function, so there will be one copy of the qsort code that is not inlined. It will make a call through the pointer to the comparison routine. In C++, std::sort is a template, and it can take a functor object as a comparator...