[rubashov]

> the biggest gains are made on an algorithmic level

I have had a few experiences of simply porting something rather directly to C++ and seeing 10X speed and memory improvements. The 'hidden costs' in other languages are loads of unavoidable heap allocations and pointer indirection that really don't happen with C++. And C++ compilers do a ton of very smart optimization these days.

With the generic programming constructs and static polymorphism approaches in C++ you can often get really big performance increases over what's practical in C or Java. std::sort in C++, for example, has often been found a few times faster than stdlib.h qsort. It's because of compile time optimizations that languages like C and Java can't do.

[comex]

Just a nitpick: sorting is a bad example because qsort could be made just as fast if it were defined in the header and marked inline. C++ provides more flexibility (you don't have to make everything inline, you can have a family of "real" functions indexed by type), but it isn't really necessary for sorting.