[loup-vaillant]

> As a developer who's worked in games, embedded, and real-time situational awareness software (ex. air traffic control), my feeling is exactly the opposite.

I call availability bias: people who work on high performance niches feel everyone is underestimating the problem. People who work on low-performance niches wonder what's the big deal.

What I have personally observed is more like a fear of poor performance, coming from people who don't understand the problem like you do. So the team choose C++, which eventually leads to an unmaintainable, slow Big Ball of Mud. 'Cause as your AOS vs SOA example demonstrates, C++ doesn't magically make your code fast. Oops.

> That does not however obviate the necessity for a systems level language to provide the capacity for such optimization.

Agreed. Just two caveats: first, C++ is really a last resort, to be used when nothing else will do, not even C+Lua or similar combination. Even for high performance code, this language is way overused. Second, while we all use the high performance infrastructure you speak of, few of us get to write it.