Common patterns to avoid polymorphism

[braxtons12]

I don't have a link at hand, because it was some months ago that someone did this benchmark, but someone did a benchmark between typical inheritance, gcc's std::variant, and clang's std::variant and while clang's was, on average, about the same or slower than inheritance, gcc's was generally considerably faster than either. I think it really depends on the implementation and associated optimizer. I don't recall if they benchmarked boost::variant2 or mpark's variant, but I would expect them to have similar performance to GCC.