Nope. Hand optimized assembly pwns C/C++. And still, ID uses almost none of that. Do they have tunnel vision too? Flickr and Facebook don't display text on

Nope. Hand optimized assembly pwns C/C++. And still, ID uses almost none of that. Do they have tunnel vision too? Flickr and Facebook don't display text on a screen. The web browser does that. What Flickr and Facebook do is serve content to huge amounts of people. In order to scale to these extents, your choice of language is not nearly the most relevant decision. Also, speed of execution is critical for web companies, while one of id's mottos is "it's done when it's done".