[FpUser]

>"As such, there is a sense in which you need to know everything about C++ in order to use it safely"

Completely disagree.

[nicoburns]

Well you at least need to know a whole plethora of things that can trigger undefined behaviour, many of which are triggered by code patterns that are idiomatic in others contexts.

This is very unlike language like most other languages where you can play around with little language specific knowledge and the worst thing that's likely to happen is a runtime exception.