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As much as people like to talk about "footguns", that's the value proposition of C++, zero cost for anything you don't use.

Managed/interpreted langs have a different proposition: pay up front for all the features, but your complexity never increases whether you use none, one or all of them.

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Well, pointer aliasing for example is a very tricky thing in C++ too. Even with strict aliasing, it is very unintuitive from the outside when you're going to trip over unexpected performance hurdles. (Does this data structure have a char* inside? Who knows, but if it does, there goes vectorization!).

If you don't dereference the char* it will get treated an an integer and be vectorizable. In C++ you don't pay for what you don't use. If you need the char* in the loop I'm not sure why you'd be thinking about vectorization. Maybe you meant parallelism?

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