I think it's pretty clear from the article that using an off-the-shelf engine is not an option for the author, because it doesn't satisfy his interest in buildi

I think it's pretty clear from the article that using an off-the-shelf engine is not an option for the author, because it doesn't satisfy his interest in building game engines ;-) That said, I agree with your previous comment about performance. Rarely, if ever, should using one programming language over another limit the performance of any game so much that it would severely affect what you can and can not do gameplay- or feature wise. Unless you use some highly dynamic scripting language that fundamentally doesn't fit the problem domain, of course (I wouldn't write a 3D engine in Python or Ruby, for example). I can somewhat understand some of the other arguments of choosing C over C++ (primarily build times), but for the most part the problems the author has with C++ appear to be philosophical. You can have almost everything you want in C++, if you're prepared to use it differently depending on your requirements. In terms of performance, it really is true that optimization only pays off for small sections of your code, so it doesn't make any sense to switch languages for that. You can most definitely make an extremely efficient data-oriented entity-component system in C++ without going having to jump through any hoops, for example.