C++ puts you don't pay for [at runtime!] what you don't use above all use. However that often means you have to know the arcanum bits to decide if need to pay for something. You can save a bit of CPU time if you don't check if a pointer is null - which is a great thing to do if you have knowledge that the pointer cannot be null - and also something that is very easy to screw up so most languages don't give you the option. (which is the right thing for them to do - a lot of people are writing C++ where they could write something else)