The likelyhood of Python crashing is a lot higher as it is much harder to know you didn't break your error handling path someplace that isn't tested. C++ sometimes has memory issues, but not nearly as often as Python has problems in the error paths.

Python is exception-based, so it's easy to avoid a crash. Say it's a webserver, you catch all exceptions around each endpoint and give HTTP 500 if it's not something you understand to be a 4xx. Exceptions are nice in that you either explicitly handle them or the caller will.

C++ has exceptions too, but I've never used them, so idk. The abseil statuses end up being used like DIY exception handling, and it's ok but a bit easier to mishandle something than in Python. And a segfault cannot(? or shouldn't) be caught and will crash the whole program.

I am not writing a web app, I'm writing an embedded system. Catching an exception is nice, but I still need my code to keep working, which memory leaks do allow, generally for a long time. yes we have had some 'memory scribbler' bugs that were a pain to track down, but they are very rare compared to changing python code and missing to make the right change to an error handling path and now Python unwinds to main instead of handling the error correctly. Note that I'm saying Python errors of that nature are more common despite comparing 50k Lines of Python to 15m lines of C++.

For short programs Python works great, but it doesn't scale to large programs.

You can comfortably write a large web app in Python or similarly in JS, and people do. For embedded, it's already out of the question for other reasons. And you probably don't want exception-based handling in embedded, yeah.