Alternatives to C/C++

Instead of sticking with C/C++ for performance consider:
1.Free Pascal -Small memory use,very fast, easy debug
2.OCaml - medium memory use, fast,very terse, functional and secure.
3.FreeBasic - very fast,easy to use, low memory use, supports QBasic code as dialect. Other Basics to consider: PureBasic/Gambas/PowerBASIC
4.Digital Mars D- fast, easy to write and debug, large library, transition from C/C++ much easier.Garbage collection can be turned off.

I found this gem in http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org
OCaml uses one of the bits in an int internally in order to be able to automatically manage the memory use (garbage collection). This is why the basic int is 31 bits, not 32 bits (63 bits if you're using a 64 bit platform). In practice this isn't an issue except in a few specialised cases. For example if you're counting things in a loop, then OCaml limits you to counting up to 1 billion instead of 2 billion. This isn't going to be a problem because if you're counting things close to this limit in any language, then you ought to be using bignums (the Nat and Big_int modules in OCaml). However if you need to do things such as processing 32 bit types (eg. you're writing crypto code or a network stack), OCaml provides a nativeint type which matches the native integer type for your platform.