At a first gander it looks like Cinder lets doesn't baby you as much, and really provides a "consistent way to do this kind of C++" as much as the library functions themselves.
That's my first impression anyway.
>First, when it comes to power and performance, C++ is still the language to beat.
Oh really?
This is borne out, IMHO, by the fact that even though everyone supposedly "knows" it's broken and how to fix it, it is by far still the most popular choice when you need very high performance with reasonable abstraction power in industry. It's been around for decades, and there's nothing worthwhile to replace it that fits in the particular domain it fits into.
I'm not advocating here -- I suspect what will happen is that as the low-level architecture of computers change, something may take it's place that maps better, but for now, that statement is no lie.
You can certainly argue over which languages are most powerful, but there's really only one other general purpose language that rivals C++ in terms of performance and that's C. C++ being nearly a strict superset of C is almost by definition more powerful.
Not necessarily. In the general case, restrictions can make a language more powerful [1], by allowing the user and the compiler to make more assumptions. E.g. removing gotos and mutations seem good ideas.
In the case of C vs C++, removing operator overloading and exceptions could turn out to make the language more powerful.
[1] If you use the right definition of `powerful'. You need a sensible definition that avoids "They are all Turing complete and thus equally powerful."
Oh, I do not really have an opinion on operator overloading in C++. I just conceded the possibility that "removing operator overloading [...] could turn out to make the language more powerful [...]", because I have heard the opinion being advanced with some good arguments.