C++ started as a humble preprocessor for C, so it's only natural that it inherited C's low-level character with its direct map to hardware, memory allocation control (stack and heap), pointer arithmetic, casts between types, dangerous lack of boundary checks, and also that of implicit initialization. Much of the early success of C++ has its roots in the decision to maintain backward compatibility with C in order to be able firstly to compile old C sources, and secondly to maintain the high performance of the resulting code.

Hence, one of the first and most important design guidelines for C++ was, and still is, the zero-overhead abstractions principle, or rephrased, you don't pay for what you don't use. The meaning of it is that each new language feature should incur no overhead if it is not used. For example, if we don't explicitly...