IMHO you can't effectively ask this question at such a broad level. A better question would be "is C/C++ worth it for my project?". Or with respect to the contents of the blog post, "is C/C++ worth it for performing a cumulative sum?"
This isn't to say that major strides haven't been made in the performance of high level VMs, interpreters and compilers. But for some classes of applications, it's arguably not worth trying to avoid C or C++. Audio software is bound by very stringent realtime requirements (you absolutely cannot miss a sample vector -- dropouts are bad bad bad), such that GC becomes problematic in many cases. If you're writing a raster effects chain, a sensible thing to do in C would be to pass a pointer to your frame buffer through a chain of function pointers operating on the data in place and avoiding copying at all costs.
Point being, the more constraints like these that pile up, the harder time a compiler will have guessing what kind of performance characteristics you're looking for, and though I'm sure there are ways to get around these problems in higher level environments, you may end up finding that the time you spend tuning things to get it just right would have been better spent getting your hands dirty with some C. But as with everything, YMMV.
This isn't to say that major strides haven't been made in the performance of high level VMs, interpreters and compilers. But for some classes of applications, it's arguably not worth trying to avoid C or C++. Audio software is bound by very stringent realtime requirements (you absolutely cannot miss a sample vector -- dropouts are bad bad bad), such that GC becomes problematic in many cases. If you're writing a raster effects chain, a sensible thing to do in C would be to pass a pointer to your frame buffer through a chain of function pointers operating on the data in place and avoiding copying at all costs.
Point being, the more constraints like these that pile up, the harder time a compiler will have guessing what kind of performance characteristics you're looking for, and though I'm sure there are ways to get around these problems in higher level environments, you may end up finding that the time you spend tuning things to get it just right would have been better spent getting your hands dirty with some C. But as with everything, YMMV.