> best case scenario since there is very little memory management involved and runtime is dominated by computation in tight loops.
This describes most C programs and many, if not most, C++ programs. Basically, this is how C/C++ code is being written, by avoiding memory management, especially in tight loops.
This depends heavily on what problem domain you're talking about. For example, a DBMS is necessarily going to shuffle a lot of data into and out of memory.