> Other languages optimize understandability of the programming semantics (what is this algorithm doing) but do very little to aid in expressing runtime semantics (how will this algorithm execute on the machine).

I think this is painting other languages that aren't C++ with too wide a brush. There are many non-C++ languages that make it "easy" to control the low-level generated code (though I question really how easy it is with how incredibly aggressive in optimization modern C++ compilers are).