It stems from the misunderstanding that programming is telling a computer _what_ to do. But telling a computer _how_ to do it is actually what programming is, and in order to be truly "zero cost", an abstraction must retain the ability for the programmer to specify "how".
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Really the core concept here that needs to be understood is anything that is not supervised by an expert is probably being done less efficiently than it should be. "Zero cost" is just not a good term. It's never zero cost. We could have a different term, surely.
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But the term "zero cost" should be retired because it gives people (especially those that don't know how to look at compiler output!) a false sense of security that they are not creating inefficient programs by employing a particular feature, when often times they actually are.
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