Yes, I am totally serious.
Where did I write "who cares about performance"? And why do you think any of what I said is going to cost 2x-3x performance? Performance has been either a major part of or simply my entire job for most of my career, and I usually make projects I run into at least an order of magnitude faster. For example by switching a project from pure C to Objective-C. Or ditching SQLite despite the fact that it's super-optimized. Or by turning a 12+ machine distributed system into a single JAR running on a single box.
The Web browser and WWW were invented on a NeXT with Objective-C. It wasn't just a browser, but also an editor. In ~5KLOC written in a couple of months by a single person. NCSA Mosaic took a team of 5 a year and was 100KLOC in C++. No editing. So pure code-size is also a problem. And of course these days code size has a significant performance impact all by itself, but also 20x the code in C++ is going to take a significantly longer time to compile.
In terms of performance, the myth that you need to use something like C++ for the entire project is just that: a myth. First, the entire codebase doesn't need to have the same performance levels, a lot of code is pretty cold and won't have measurable impact on performance, especially if you have good/hi-perf components to interact with. See 97:3 and "The End of Optimizing Compilers". Or my "BookLightning" imposition program, which has its core imposition routine written in Objective-Smalltalk, probably one of the slowest languages currently in existence. Yet it beats Apple's CoreGraphics (written in C and heavily optimized) at the similar task of n-up printing by orders of magnitude.
Second, time lost waiting for the compiler is not "convenience", it is productivity. If you get done more quickly, you have more time to spend on optimizing the parts of the program that really matter, and thoughtful optimization tends to have a much larger impact on performance than thoughtless performance. The idea that this is purely a language thing is naive. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHG_zw75SjE
Third, you don't need to have C++ style compilers and features to have a language that has fast code, see for example Turbo Pascal mentioned in other comments. When TP came out, we had a Pascal compiler running on our PDP-11 that used something like 4-5 passes and took ages to compile code. TP was essentially instantaneous, so fast that our CS teacher just kept hitting that compile key just for the joy of watching it do its thing. It also produced really fast code.