You missed my point entirely, I think. Yes, if you want to write a loop doing a single type of processing, numerical or string, you can typically write better

You missed my point entirely, I think. Yes, if you want to write a loop doing a single type of processing, numerical or string, you can typically write better code in C++, or a shader language. Most business applications don't follow that pattern at all. It's a mix of many types of operations. Look at the Techempower benchmarks, for example; the Java frameworks tend to do better than the C++ ones, at least when it comes to throughput (C++ is more competitive when it comes to latency). I believe it's due to the HotSpot compiler doing aggressive, profile-guided optimization (you can do AOT profile-guided optimization but few people actually do it; in Java you get that automatically) as well as the garbage collector. Memory allocation is a fast as incrementing a pointer. Whereas C++ will tend to do way more housekeeping; in Java that housekeeping is amortized when you call the GC. That hurts latency but helps throughput.