Or a cutting edge game, or a high frequency trading system, or a high performance server, or an operating system, or implementing a language, or a database, or a numerical library, or a crypto library, or a VM...
Again, you need to wrap your mind around:
(1) Some things will be written in C++
(2) C++ is not a synonym for "low-level." Many of your examples are really referring to C and assembly. Why would you prefer a C++ implementation of a crypto library to a C one?
(3) The vast majority of computer code written today is not for any of these systems. Lots of code uses these systems, but most people are happy with language bindings for a crypto API. Or to a numerical processing library. Or running on a VM running on an OS.
Does anyone have empirical data that the C++ fraction of software written today is increasing? If so, then you have a case. I'm going to guess that that fraction has been falling for quite some time, and will continue to fall.
I agree that there is a ton of code being written where byte-level manipulation is not needed and is not appropriate. But there is still a ton of code where it is needed or appropriate, and you misrepresent that when you say you shouldn't be doing it unless you're writing a device driver or compression library.
Here's an example from the EVP_Digest* man page from OpenSSL, with some comments added:
EVP_MD_CTX *mdctx;
// forget this part and get undefined behavior (but maybe it seems to work, sometimes)
mdctx = EVP_MD_CTX_create();
// forget this part? more and different runtime errors
EVP_DigestInit_ex(mdctx, md, NULL);
EVP_DigestUpdate(mdctx, mess1, strlen(mess1));
EVP_DigestUpdate(mdctx, mess2, strlen(mess2));
// md_value allocated with malloc()? don't forget to free()
EVP_DigestFinal_ex(mdctx, md_value, &md_len);
// forget this part, or remember it but miss an "if(err) return -1" statement somewhere? memory leak
EVP_MD_CTX_destroy(mdctx);
Comparable C++ implementation:
// RAII, compile error if you don't provide constructor argument instead of runtime error if you don't call init function
EVP_Digest_CTX ctx(md);
ctx.update(msg1, msg1_size);
ctx.update(msg2, msg2_size);
// return simple object: typed dynamic byte array + size with its own destructor, both digest and ctx destructors get called when function returns from anywhere
EVP_Digest digest = ctx.final_result();
And it's 4 lines of code instead of 7.
Can you explain why I would want the C version?
Additionally Microsoft is now replacing parts of the Windows C codebase to C++, as mentioned at the latest Build 2012 conference.