And I've seen a few C++ project which after translating to Java got some big performance improvements. Java's Collection.sort outperforms C's qsort significant

And I've seen a few C++ project which after translating to Java got some big performance improvements. Java's Collection.sort outperforms C's qsort significantly (and is very close to C++ std::sort for general cases). Java's GCed pointers outperform C++ shared_ptr significantly. Java's dynamic dispatch works in worst case with the same performance as C++'s one, but often works much faster. Java's cost of array bound checking is lower than in C++. Java's immutable strings are safe to pass by pointer everywhere, while C++ ones need often copying. Building anything close in performance e.g. to immutable Scala Vector or parallel collections is downright impossible in C/C++, because of lack of GC and shared_ptr is a performance no-go. There are plenty of places where high level abstractions are better implemented in high level language, than in low-level one.