Comment by flowerbreeze
6 hours ago
When writing code for end-user applications, I think it's mostly true. When it's writing code for a database engine, a game engine, a 3d renderer, or anything else that involves heavy data processing, optimization is the core "thing" often and it might not even be a good enough solution without it. Although, a lot of time even then C++ is good enough even then when picking reasonable data structures to represent the data.
These are what I like to call "infinity applications" where the need for speed is essentially infinite.
Even if you write them in hand-optimized assembly they would still clamor for more speed.