I write in C++ almost every day but never have the need to optimize for speed. Even when you write straightforward code it's already blazingly fast.
When writing code for end-user applications, I think it's mostly true. When it's writing code for a database engine, a game engine, a 3d renderer, or anything else that involves heavy data processing, optimization is the core "thing" often and it might not even be a good enough solution without it. Although, a lot of time even then C++ is good enough even then when picking reasonable data structures to represent the data.
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Even if you write them in hand-optimized assembly they would still clamor for more speed.
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