1% faster?!

And what do you mean by "most real-life problems"? HN is rather biased towards web development, so...

C++ is used for real life problems from web browsers, to physics engines, fluid solvers, photorealistic renderers (in fact, pretty much all software used to make most visual effects CG for movies is in C++), autopilot systems, and pretty much everything in between.

And as yet, there's nothing else that comes close to allowing both high-level abstractions/encapsulations and low-level memory alignment/allocation/control as and when needed, which is important for high performance and memory efficient (bit packing, tagged pointers, etc) code.