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While that is a risk, it's not a necessity. Many of the classes in the C++ standard library are designed in exactly this way without runtime performance issues. All of the wrapping and indirection get inlined at compile time.

I don't agree. I'm pretty sure we can make apps today equivalent to those from 20 years ago that are an order of magnitude more responsive even with all the indirection layers (640x480 resolution, 256 colours, no ui animations etc.)

20 years ago (94!) one was always waiting for graphical applications to respond, and lots of people prefered command line applications instead, because of it.

Currently, almost all interatcions with nearly all applications (Firefox and OpenOffice charged as guilty) are intantly.