Obviously you've never worked on the cutting edge of computer science research. As a Bioinformatician, I often work with sequence data from experiments like the Human genome project. As one could expect the size of data for analysis is huge - often in the millions to billions of base pairs.
One of the advantages of a language like C++ is that you CAN directly manipulate the memory. Don't get me wrong, I've used 'safe' languages like Java and Python before, but in my experience, for anything really computationally intensive these 'safety' features slow down computation so much that some calculatons are just not feasible.
Don't get me wrong - for applications where speed is not an issue these 'safe' languages are the way to go, but it's important to remember that this 'safety' comes with the trade-off of performance.
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Obviously you've never worked on the cutting edge of computer science research. As a Bioinformatician, I often work with sequence data from experiments like the Human genome project. As one could expect the size of data for analysis is huge - often in the millions to billions of base pairs. One of the advantages of a language like C++ is that you CAN directly manipulate the memory. Don't get me wrong, I've used 'safe' languages like Java and Python before, but in my experience, for anything really computationally intensive these 'safety' features slow down computation so much that some calculatons are just not feasible. Don't get me wrong - for applications where speed is not an issue these 'safe' languages are the way to go, but it's important to remember that this 'safety' comes with the trade-off of performance.