"every single computing device, billions of them, are working non-stop, days and weeks and months on end"
working non-stop? No, they don't. Today’s computers are filled with bugs because bad implementations that comes from bad implementation languages and bad tooling.
The reason C++ is used is because backwards compability/legacy/history trumps everything else. Just look at MS Windows for a proof for that. Or x86 CPU architecture.
Those are claims that go against my personal experience (pretty much every device and server system I control has uptime in weeks or months). So unless you can actually show me some hard data to the contrary...
You on the other hand seem to be implying that a different programming model will result in a never crashing system at the scale of the current internet.
Remember Erlang runtime is also written in C ultimately. I would have believed claims about Erlang "never crashes" if I hadn't had to personally debug mysterious hangs in Erlang runtime (running RabbitMQ):
working non-stop? No, they don't. Today’s computers are filled with bugs because bad implementations that comes from bad implementation languages and bad tooling.
The reason C++ is used is because backwards compability/legacy/history trumps everything else. Just look at MS Windows for a proof for that. Or x86 CPU architecture.