This is besides the point. The only good reason to use C++ is because you (1) need a level of abstraction that C doesn't give you, (2) need level of performanc

This is besides the point. The only good reason to use C++ is because you (1) need a level of abstraction that C doesn't give you, (2) need level of performance that no garbage collected language can give you (even compiled ones), and (3) can't even use C + Lua (or some other scripting language), probably because you need the abstraction and the performance in the same place. (This is an awfully narrow application domain, compared to what C++ is actually used for) At that point, the performance characteristics of your programs have become part of the specs. You do not want to hide them under the carpet like you would do with a garbage collected language. Yet C++ does. It wouldn't hurt if it syntactically distinguished initializations, casts, calls by reference and so on.