I think this applies to any kind of advanced software development or programming languages, not only C++.
There may be many reasons why scientists who are not computer scientists feel more comfortable with Go than with C++, but performance is certainly not one of them.
It depends on your definition of "wrong".
You can mess up your domain logic with any language, but the chances of messing up perf (and even some ref vs. copy semantics that effect logic) in C++ are vastly greater than in GC'd langs.
I've ported C++ code to C# with much perf gain, due to c'tors of every kind getting called all over the place. Doing it right in C++ is too much cognitive overload -- at least for me. If you're writing inner game loops or device drivers, I feel I need to pay for this complexity - for any LOB apps, I can't see choosing C++, or even Rust for that matter.
Rust certainly comes with its share of complexity, but it might be worth clarifying that Rust doesn't have this specific problem of implicit constructors called all over the place. Instead, everything uses move semantics by default.
But most life scientists using the library for their work are not; Go is a language they can master, as well as Python or Lua; if they're biophysicists they're likely to know Fortran and C as well, but I rarely meet scientists fluent in C++. Also not sure how much experience the authors have with such software projects.
What is easy is to write C++ as if it was Java. (You just stick to the standard containers and use smart pointers when allocating objects on the heap.)
