1. What did Linus say about C++ performance?
   Well, he said nothing. He just generally trashed C++ for being too nice. In his own words:
   Inefficient abstracted programming models where two years down the road you notice that some abstraction wasn't very efficient, but now all your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you cannot fix it without rewriting your app. In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people don't screw that up, and it also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any idiotic object model crap.
   Think about it. Hopefully, now you understand low-level issues and don't screw up...