I can see it going both ways. Talking about execution times, this would be an exaggeration, but then, these memes always are.

The KDE team has already determined that this is not a bug and that both you and me must just be imagining it:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481058

In a language that has exceptions, there is no good reason to return bool here…

Also, almost all of that is written in C, which is a successor to B, which is a simplified version of the Basic Combined Programming Language. There was never an A.