An alternative to C++ in this situation is to have a C core or set of C libraries, with bindings up to something like JavaScript or Lua. World of Warcraft, Emac

An alternative to C++ in this situation is to have a C core or set of C libraries, with bindings up to something like JavaScript or Lua. World of Warcraft, Emacs, Firefox are a few popular examples of that architecture. GNOME 3 works this way too. It's pretty important to have good automation for the C-to-high-level conversion, for example GNOME has a gobject-introspection to do this, and Firefox has XPCOM. Otherwise it becomes too tedious and bug-prone to be gluing two languages together by hand all the time. An old blog post http://blog.ometer.com/2008/08/25/embeddable-languages/ http://blog.ometer.com/2008/08/25/embeddable-languages/ I suppose node.js could be considered another example of this approach, by writing the super-tiny-and-fast event loop and http parser in C and then putting all the application logic in JavaScript.