Don't underestimate the cost of trivial maintenance. In any project constrained by time, you risk people skipping on these things in part of the system. Erlang/Elixir is pretty well built for robustness, so a single library is less likely to affect the system as a whole. The same cannot be said for C++, where every part has to be close to correct for the operation to proceed as you expect.

The trade-off you get however, is that the explicit control in C++ tend to produce systems which run faster under nominal operation.

In practice, many Erlang systems contains some C/C++ parts at their core for fast operation. Depending on their complexity, you try to isolate them from the rest of the system as much as you can. In short, you use Erlang as a top-level control backplane for your C/C++ code. The advantage is you get the speed of C++ where needed, but the added productivity of Erlang everywhere else.

Erlang programmers are usually practically minded in this regard. "functional purity" doesn't really matter that much if the problem isn't solved.

Not trivially, no. Even if you try to avoid "raw pointers", C++ is an unsafe language by design, and it's non-trivial to turn it into a verifiably safe one:

* Even smart pointers are still pointers, which are trivial to access after release by mistake; and references are only safe as long as the caller still exists. C++ does not have anything like Rust's borrow checker.

* C++ threads allow race conditions that can screw up even smart pointers.

* Plenty of libraries (C and C++), which are usually impossible to avoid and completely impractical to vet, will still use raw pointers.

Generally, the word "trivial" and C++ don't go well together.

Note I was explicitly objecting about null pointers begin impossible to avoid. My claim is that the C++ type system allow avoiding them just fine.

I'm making no claim about general the memory safety of C++, and its issues are well known.