You just compared C++ to the slowest popular language out there. It would be a much more fair comparison if you used pretty much any other high-level language.

You just compared C++ to the slowest popular language out there. It would be a much more fair comparison if you used pretty much any other high-level language. Since you can get within about 2x of C++ speed which still using a high-level language, that makes the argument that the times you really need C++ for performance reasons are quite limited. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they are rare.