I certainly wasn't insulted. Many people like C++, I prefer C or smalltalk or even Java, but that's really just me:)

Never having used spamassasin, any further comment on that would just be speculation.

I can't think of any easy way to clone a pre-initialised instance, but you might find that the initialisation costs are mostly a first-time setup cost at the spamd end and that subsequent connections are relatively low? You'll have to try it I think.