Using a solid software configuration management (SCM) is mandatory to establish and maintain the integrity of the products of a software project throughout the project's software life cycle. Even with the help of sophisticated tools, handling the various dimensions of SCM can be a daunting (and costly) task for many projects. The contribution of this article is to (1)propose a method (based on the use creational design patterns) to simplify SCM by reifying the variants of an object-oriented software system into language-level objects and (2)show that newly available compilation technology makes this proposal attractive with respect to performance (memory footprint and execution time) by inferring which classes are needed for a specific configuration and optimizing the generated code accordingly.