What is an "effective C++ statement"? That's a really odd measure and I can't get my head around it.
It's more likely he just rounded a number of results and rounded to the first decimal place to display it better, not to suggest some level of accuracy.
Also, IE source likely is available through Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx). After all, Microsoft has vehemently argumented that IE is inseparable from the OS. I think it would require some lenient interpretation of that license to use it for this purpose, though.
Please, this is not Slashdot or /r/linux.
the extensive use of dynamic class inheritance prevents the compiler from efficiently inlining short functions as necessary
MSVC with PGO will do it, by inserting a guard on the vtable pointer and inlining the most common implementation. But you still take the possible cache miss of reading the vtable pointer, of course. And the other commonly used compilers (clang and gcc) don't do anything like this, even with PGO.
I.e., instead of writing a few quick lines of code to perform bisection search in the middle of logic flow, you create a general bisection search function and implement that.
This leads to high productivity "a statement per function", and makes code cleaner and easier to update, but can substantially increase overhead costs.
Those cost performance.