[Sohcahtoa82]

C/C++ basically do only exactly what you tell them and nothing more, which is why they're so much faster than other languages.

There's no garbage collection/reference counting/etc. going on in the background. Objects aren't going to be moved around unless you explicitly move them around (Enjoy your heap fragmentation!). In C, you don't even get exceptions.

Of course, this creates TONS of foot-guns. Buffer overflows, unchecked errors, memory leaks, etc. A modern language won't have these, except for memory leaks, but they're much less likely to happen in trivial to moderate complexity apps.