Depends on if you’re coding for critical infrastructure (i.e. - electrical grid), or writing a high performance video game that can run on older hardware.

We should absolutely have specific licenses like Civil Engineers do for computer infrastructure that is required for any software written for specific purposes. It would be a nightmare to implement, but at some point, it’s going to be needed.

writing a high performance video game that can run on older hardware

Unless it’s some really exotic platform, I’d honestly still say no. Rust has shown that memory safety and performance doesn’t have to be a tradeoff. You can have both.

But sure, if whatever you’re targeting doesn’t have a Rust compiler, then of course you have no choice. But those are extremely rare cases these days I’d say.

I don’t even think we really need to eek out every MHz of performance these days unless your shipping code for a space vehicle or something (But that’s an entirely different beast)

We’ve got embedded devices shipping with 1GHz+ processors now

It’s just time to move on from C/C++, but some people just can’t seem to let go.

Battery life is a reason. I’ve had clients come to me complaining their solution from another vendor didn’t last very long. Turns out it was running Java on an embedded device.