Last year saw a proliferation of talks and articles about safety in C++. Lucian Radu Teodorescu gives an overview of these and presents a unified perspective on safety.
I agree performance is much more about architecture than language performance at the bare metal. But especially in security-conscious environments C and C++ lose in performance because architecture decisions include mitigations that need to compensate for the languages’ lack of safety. I know of several projects where C or C++ code is either delegated to separate processes with reduced permissions or to WASM sandboxes. Firefox even famously used to compile C++ code to WASM and then used a WASM ahead-of-time compiler to turn it back into native code that still maintained properties of being sandboxed. Such measures gravely impact performance however, so in those instances C is far removed from having a performance lead.
I agree performance is much more about architecture than language performance at the bare metal. But especially in security-conscious environments C and C++ lose in performance because architecture decisions include mitigations that need to compensate for the languages’ lack of safety. I know of several projects where C or C++ code is either delegated to separate processes with reduced permissions or to WASM sandboxes. Firefox even famously used to compile C++ code to WASM and then used a WASM ahead-of-time compiler to turn it back into native code that still maintained properties of being sandboxed. Such measures gravely impact performance however, so in those instances C is far removed from having a performance lead.