My grandpappy always told me to cut out the middleman.
Modern C++ was heavily influenced by the need to make it simple to use directly. If you are in the business of writing code instead of reminiscing, you can now leverage move semantics, lambdas, and smarter pointers to create software that is close to the silicon.
Python might be great, but it sure is slow. Its success is founded on smart people making it easier for not so smart people to call C++ that does the heavy lifting.
A big force multiplier in the old GS secdb model was simply the speed of the dev cycle vs speed of the code. As a strat you could push slang changes to pricing and risk literally in minutes with full testing, backout, object audit logging etc.
C++ changes went out in a 2 week release cycle so changes were still fast by most standards but much slower. But yeah we had 20m + lines of C++ code so it was extensively used.
