Agree, but if the code is used even only once, it gets loaded to memory. So if you've got a complex_generic_container<T1, T2>, its code gets loaded for every combination of types used.
It gets loaded and then most likely paged out, particularly if your linker is profile guided (but even if not... rarely used code tends to get linked with other rarely used code).
It's fair that if you want to optimize startup times, that first page in hurts, although generally with C++ is's more about the symbol linking overhead than anything else (and there are a lot of strategies for minimizing that, but it sure isn't want happens by default).
