[casey2]

This is the difference between scripting and programming. If you use C++ as a scripting language you're gonna have a bad time.Of course a scripting language is faster for scripting! That doesn't mean you go full Graham and throw away real programming languages, it just means you aren't writing systems software.

The usual strategy is to write a script then if it's slow see how you could design a program that would

The usual strategy in the real world is to copy paste thousands of lines of C++ code until someone comes along and writes a proper direct solution to the problem.

Of course there are ideas on how to fix this, either writing your own scripting libraries (stb), packages (go/rust/ts), metaprogramming (lisp/jai). As for bugs those are a function of how you choose to write code, the standard way of writing shell it bug prone, the standard way of writing python is less so, not using overloading & going wider in c++ generally helps.

[deterministic]

I use C++ instead of so called 'scripting' languages all the time. I have zero problems doing that and it is lightning fast.