I stayed away from C++ for about 15 years, while working in higher level languages (C#, Go). I recently came back to it and my productivity is SOOO much higher,

I stayed away from C++ for about 15 years, while working in higher level languages (C#, Go). I recently came back to it and my productivity is SOOO much higher, along with my code quality. I argue that for certain applications, the ability to work directly with memory is paramount. I shaved 35ns off of a critical routine the other day with a clever memory hack. And in another example, I doubled the speed of a critical loop simply by rearranging variables within a struct so that the CPU had more efficient access to them by avoiding page cache faults. Mind you, this code already runs hundreds of times faster than anything written in Go or any other garbage collection language can do.