Sorry didn't mean to set off your bullshit radar. I have been programming for almost 25 years I guess, and actually C was my first language. I have programmed in many languages over the years. I can fully appreciate function call overhead, but when it comes to web backend programming, it's not where performance problems come from most of the time. For context I work for a company with decent scale (think half a billion users) and where performance really does matter. Using the repository pattern does not create performance issues. I don't think I've ever seen someone argue that... It's a bit weird to be honest. What does matter is having the ability to hand roll your sql and properly understand what those queries are doing. And to know when to optimise, when to apply indexes, when to shard tables etc.