Believe me, those who truly believe that C++ is great, consider some of those deficiencies to be advantages. It helps to remember, that C and C++ don't exist o

Believe me, those who truly believe that C++ is great, consider some of those deficiencies to be advantages. It helps to remember, that C and C++ don't exist on an "VM island", i.e. as an isolated process, like all high-level programming languages do. They are effectively extensions of UNIX-derived operating systems, i.e. they run under "UNIX VM". They even have a garbage collection of sorts: when you exit the program, the memory gets freed. And, according to Linux philosophy, launching processes or forking/dying should be quick, efficient and, in fact, desirable. Also, having many independent binary modules is the norm, so here is your runtime encapsulation. But C family is still the only tool out there that allows you to extend an OS, i.e. for instance to build a piece of code, a single instance of which will be serving all other simultaneously running processes. This explains why Apache eats so little RAM. None of VM-based languages can do that. It's called systems programming. Building a web-based CRM in C++ is stupid. Building a filesystem in Python is impossible.