[be21]

  In most cases maintainability wins,
  and avoiding “premature optimization”
  is very much a necessity in C++.

I agree with this conclusion. Quite often, when you start coding you don't know, where the performance bottlenecks hide, and you don't want to waste time, thinking about allocating memory for a routine which you could write equally well in any scripting language. Unfortunately plugable automatic garbage collection for less verbose performance uncritical scripting tasks within the language is not usable.