Sure, but the whole point of using a higher level language is to use some of those higher level features. It seems somewhat... unfair to argue that C++ "can be fast" so long as you basically restrict it to its C subsets.

I want the code to be both high level and fast. A language is of no use to me as a performance target if in order to get performance with it you have to use a tony subset of it.

Sure, every language has fast and slow ways of doing things