[Pacabel]

I think that C++ is so useful in practice because it gives you most of each of those, rather than just some of two (or even just one) of them.

Programs written in C++ aren't necessarily the fastest out there, but they're usually pretty close. They're at least almost always better than what you'd get when using most other languages.

And the same goes for safety. It may not allow you to write bulletproof code, but using modern C++ techniques can go a very long way toward avoiding many common problems with relative ease.

C++ may not be the most productive language for some developers, but it still does quite a good job of offering a wide variety of functionality, reasonably high-level constructs, good library support, and decent tooling.

[thinkpad20]

C++ has just as much capacity to be unsafe as C, precisely because it accepts nearly all C code, not to mention that it has bare pointers, null references, and any number of other unsafe objects as first-class citizens. Of course, you're unlikely to use most of those if you're following best practices, but the same can be said of C. You might argue that C++ makes it easier to be safe because of its plethora of features and classes, but the massive size of C++ makes it a very hard language to master, and nearly impossible to guarantee that everyone will be conforming to best practices. C++ is quite possibly the largest language out there in terms of features, and with about the most gotchas (things that don't work the way you'd intuitively expect them to) that it's possible to put in a language. It's a step above C in terms of safety, but it is hardly a safe language, and it's only slightly more productive, because the benefits of its class system and standard library are so much at odds with it's huge mental overhead.

[Dewie]

Maybe I should add another attribute to my original three - language complexity. :)