Although C++ is better in many respects, it has inherited many of the problematic features of C. (From here on when I refer to “C”, I mean to include the subset of C++ that shares these issues.) ...

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.

Answer by Gayle Laakmann McDowell, Ex-Googler, Author of Cracking the Coding Interview and The Google Resume, If there are two programmers who are equally good, but one knows Java and the other ...