Comment by gumby

See my response to a parallel comment from dannas.

I can see some minor corner cases where it could be worthwhile but the mental overhead isn't worth it.

I've written plenty of realtime code but spending a lot of time on the code running in the interrupt handlers is mentally exhausting and error prone; I do that when I have no choice. Likewise I've written a lot of assembly code but it's been decades since I wrote a whole program that way -- I don't have enough fingers to keep track of all the labels and call paths.

E.g. just because c++ has pointers doesn't mean I use them very often. >90% of the cases can be references instead.