Yes I see your point to a degree, in a way we're working in a sort of "highlevel C++" most of the time at some performance cost: We have strict coding conventions in place which forbid low-level C/C++ stuff in high-level code (no raw pointers, no C-style arrays, no pointer arithmetics, no C library functions, etc...). Plus static code analysis and tons of runtime asserts. I can't remember the last time we had a buffer overflow or pointer-gone-wild. The performance hit of C++ compiled to JS is surprisingly small (1.5x native performance in Firefox, a bit slower in Chrome, but the gap is getting smaller, this is in the same ballpark as strongly typed bytecode languages like C# or Java).