It is probably very domain specific. In robotics for example everything is a zero sum game: CPU, memory bandwidth, GPU, battery life etc ... So it is really a topic, probably true for anything embedded actually. Some other offline applications: HFT, Telco etc.. I wish the GUI apps devs respect more the laptop resources they are running on, don't get me started on the 4 instances of chrome I need to run just for discord, signal etc ...

When writing code for end-user applications, I think it's mostly true. When it's writing code for a database engine, a game engine, a 3d renderer, or anything else that involves heavy data processing, optimization is the core "thing" often and it might not even be a good enough solution without it. Although, a lot of time even then C++ is good enough even then when picking reasonable data structures to represent the data.

Definitely need to optimize a bit for games and huge scale web apps. We've been finding big optimizations in our app recently. App works without them because we can scale horizontally but cutting CPU usage by 30% by eliminating redundant work and reducing copies of big objects? Why wouldn't we want to do that? This isn't even fancy algorithm stuff, mostly just shoddy initial implementations by 100s of eng working on a codebase over 7 years (not even that old). Stuff like that creeps in.

This follows Rob Pike’s 5 Rules for Programming

https://web.archive.org/web/20250201145327/https://users.ece...

This is a sign you might be more productive in a higher-level language.

True, but moving from a list of unique polymorphic pointers to a std::variant gains you at least a 2-3x speed up in terms of TLB and cacheline locality. From there, swapping to SOA will net you another 4-8x, so you're looking at nearly 25x improvement by going data first. That may not matter in the unique case of say, games, where rendering a million entities will dwarf the cost of SIMD processing a million entities, but in something like numerical simulations (fluids) or quant it will be warmly welcomed

I started writing a [CPU-only] 3-D rendering library in C++ recently, after having written the equivalent in C as a proof-of-concept and an experiment. The reason I decided to write it in C++ after C, is not only because I wanted to tap into meta-programming which is facilitated much better with C++, or that I wanted niceties like procedure overloading, but because some things with C or C++ aren't automagically optimised -- like if you want to leverage struct-of-array (SoA) memory layouts because it allows fewer SIMD (AVX in my case) instructions in the rendering pipeline. You do _not_ get that "for free" just writing a single procedure in C++, much less with C. Both languages are layout-sensitive, I mean this is in part what gives you the speed -- optimising with memory layout for cache locality etc. But you have to do it yourself. Meaning that if you need array-of-struct (AoS) or in fact don't know which path the CPU would prefer, there's no other way than roll up your sleeves and one way or another implement both.

The kicker is, in my case I chose C++ because templates allow me to reuse most of the code in the rendering pipeline _regardless_ of whether I go for AoS or SoA layout. I leverage operator overloading to do vector by matrix multiplication which is implemented in both variants. I do have to specify the desired variant during building, but I've profiled and for Intel x86 AVX in my case SoA is something like twice as efficient because I process ("shade") 8 vertices with 4-5 instructions instead of 1 vertex at a time (still shaded with vectorisation -- just "rotated", i.e in the pipeline axis and not vertex buffer axis).

TL;DR; C++ gives you plenty fast by default, but it's not always enough. The difference between 5 and 15 frames per second, well, makes all the difference -- our eyes are only fooled once the frames-per-second rate goes sufficiently up, anything below an acceptable threshold and it's completely different experience. You then either sacrifice resolution or level of detail etc, or decide to squeeze more from the language by helping the compiler.

I rarely use C++ but when I do it is for speed. It’s not uncommon that carefully crafted intrinsics can 10x the straightforward naive implementation.

Then you don't work on a product that has any scale <shrug>.