Comment by ryao

Having worked on performance sensitive code (OpenZFS), I have found less to be more.

While C code makes more heavy use of linked lists than C++ code, most of the C code I have helped maintain made even heavier use of balanced binary search trees and B-trees than linked lists. It also used SLAB allocation to amortize allocation costs. In the case of OpenZFS, most of the code operated in the kernel where external memory fragmentation makes dynamic arrays (and “large” arrays in general) unusable.

I think you have not seen the C libraries available to make C even better. libuutil and libumem from OpenSolaris make doing these things extremely nice. Some of the first code I wrote professionally (and still maintain) was written in C++. There really is nothing from C++ that I miss in C when I have such libraries. In fact, I have long wanted to rewrite that C++ code in C since I find it easier to maintain due to the reduced abstractions.