What type and size of applications have you worked on?

@pron, who works on the JVM and is a C++ expert, has been writing a lot recently about low level languages becoming increasingly impossible to optimize with more LOC and more people working on it (dozens, or even hundreds of developers).

The idea being be a language with an aggressive JIT, moving garbage collector, and bump allocation is going to allocate/deallocte faster than malloc, and get the most important average optimizations at all times, where as the equivalent low level app will struggle to get the ideal allocation pattern the more people that work on it, or be forced to use slow dynamic dispatch. He wouldn't describe a GC as pessimistic, he'd say it's literally faster, and that's why he (a C++ programmer) works on it. The JVM was built by people saying "we are doing a handful of the same things in C++ all the time."

There are specific cases where it's good to have low level control, but they aren't everywhere.