Java will have value types soon. Also, C++ does some heap allocations behind-the-scenes quite often (e.g. with vector or string) which are hard to get rid of and they are much more expensive than in JVM/CLR. So not always idiomatic C++ smashes JVM/CLR in performance. YMMV and typical differences are small enough to not matter for most of server-side software like web-apps, web-servers or databases.