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How do those features impact runtime performance?

One example of templates affecting runtime performance is poor use of the instruction cache due to code duplication in every instantiation of a template.

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If you are instantiating equivalent functions (sorting foo* vs sorting bar* ) then the linker will merge their binaries -no dupes there. If you are generating different functions (sorting foo vs foo* ) then you are asking for different functions -no dupes there either. If you want to keep everything down to one function, qsort() didn't disappear when they added std::sort() and it is pretty close to what a dynamic language sort would do under the hood.

Some linkers do what you describe. Not all.

I believe this is called Identical COMDAT Folding in VC++

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