The Cost of Indirection in Rust
Summary
A Rust-focused blog post argues that the cost of indirection is often overstated as a reason to inline; in async Rust, small function boundaries may be inlined by the compiler in release builds, making extracted boundaries effectively free. The real performance costs usually come from I/O, locking, or CPU-bound work, while cognitive load and maintainability drive code quality; the piece advocates measuring with benchmarks and profilers before optimizing and recommends extracting functions for readability when it improves clarity.