The use of managed language will not necessarily result in a more stable code. Recovering form SIGSEGV by installing a POSIX handler or detecting the death of the forked child process in C++ can be done with the same ease as catching NullPointer Runtime exception in Java.

I would agree that having to write memory management code is error prone, but it is possible to be careful (i.e., use auto pointers, stl vectors instead of arays, etc). You do need to be very good with C++, however.

My suggestion to the author is to look at the application servers that support C++ components. I worked with a small, relatively unknown server, but even that product had a feature that kept the server up even when some C++ component (running as a forked process) crashed.