> You've essentially described C

I'd disagree pretty strongly with that. C is more focused on being relatively simple to implement and backwards compatibility with the past 50 years. (I read a blog post by a C committee member talking about that recently, wish I could find the link)

Just look at the garbage fire which is the standard library. qsort. strtok. rand.

C++ should (in theory at least) be able to match or surpass C for _any_ performance benchmark, because it simply gives you more tools in your toolbox. For example, C is never going to be able to beat std::sort because it can't monomorphize in the compare function.

I'm not saying C++ is perfect either (looking at you unordered_map and regex). But I am saying people look at C with rose colored glasses.