...but, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
I'm also glad I do not write C++ on the daily anymore: luckily my software does not need that kind of performance characteristics.
You can write pretty fast and reasonable code nowadays.
As an aside, you may want to check out Jai's approach. I believe everything you generate statically gets turned into a file by the compiler for debugging purposes, which it provides references to in the output.
RyanJK5•1h ago
Check out the source code: https://github.com/RyanJK5/rjk-duck