C++’s thread safe smart pointers are three times slower than Java references. And Java has HotSpot Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which features just-in-time (JIT) compilation for better performance.

Really. But, does Google prefer, on the margin, C++ over Java? Not really. Java is actually easier in some ways in that you won't have to worry about memory management and pointers in an interview.

C++ and Java. For anyone writing their own or adopting Google’s parser written in C++ (a super fast compiled language), Google has released the source code for its robots.txt parser validation ...