> So by violating the first rule of clean code — which is one of its central tenants — we are able to drop from 35 cycles per shape to 24 cycles per shape, impling that code following that rule number is 1.5x slower than code that doesn’t. To put that in in hardware terms, it would be like taking an iPhone 14 Pro Max and reducing it to an iPhone 11 Pro Max. It's three or four years of hardware evolution erased because somebody said to use polymorphism instead of switch statements.

The benchmark is a tight loop where the vtable lookup is a big chunk of the total computation. I don't think one can extrapolate this 1.5x improvement to real code. If anything, it represents an upper bound on the performance improvement you might expect to see.

I also didn't see anything about how the code was compiled. Various optimizations could affect performance in meaningful ways.