C, still?

The paper cited is one in a long line of apologia. There was a time when writing apologia was a respected activity, and apologia were widely persuasive. Although reading old apologia offers a precious glimpse into a lost world, they have ceased to persuade. As well-written as they often were (and remain), too many of the facts they cited have turned out to be falsehoods, and too many of the truisms have turned out, in the fullness of time, to be mere truthiness. (This last term seems quaint now; only a year ago, truth was something even liars pretended to.) Too many of the merits claimed were, in fact, harms, or are merits we may claim without accepting the argument.

In this case, essentially all of its valid arguments apply equally well to C and C++; the author contrasts them with "managed languages". However, he presents as a truism that C is faster than other languages, where we know that well-written C++ is routinely faster than C. In general, though, the arguments are basically irrelevant to the topic of upgrading from C to C++ . Arguments over the merits of "safe" languages, in general, are suspect; the real question is where we expect to get correctness. Testing is nice, and checkers, and validators, but the place to get the pure stuff is by construction. When your language is powerful enough to present facilities (i.e., libraries) that admit only valid operations, without compromising performance, worries over invalid operations creeping in vanish.