C++ can be a nice language if you are disciplined with it, but being disciplined means not using every feature and using features only when they make code clearer or higher quality.
Unfortunately, it's not only you who must be disciplined, but all of your colleagues/collaborators and to a lesser extent the authors of any libraries you happen to depend upon (or will depend upon). Which is a shame, because writing C++ can be a whole lot of fun, but the aforementioned invariants rarely hold.
Perhaps a well-written bio informatics library would be a nice solution.