Good point! For me, I think the question here isn't so much "performance gains" as "interoperability, near-ubiquity, and staying power". For "interoperability"

Good point! For me, I think the question here isn't so much "performance gains" as "interoperability, near-ubiquity, and staying power". For "interoperability", I'm just going to quote myself: "If you write your library in Perl, guess what, only people writing Perl will use it. If you write it in Java, well, maybe the Scala folk will wrap it up, or the Jython folk, but you won't get any people writing in Ruby to use it. If you write it in C++, you can provide efficient bindings to any of those languages." In terms of ubiquity, what I mean is that almost every platform has a standards-compliant-ish C++ compiler for it. And before people get in a tizzy, I mean weird platforms, not just computers with a browser installed. That's Intel, yes, but also DSPs, FPGAs, ARMs, and whole host of other chips. This didn't used to be true, but with LLVM, almost an entire standards-compliant C++ toolchain can be generated for your platform pretty easily. The exception tends to be, ironically enough, exceptions. They need to be special-cased for your chip, but still, C++ exists in places where the JVM doesn't dare go. And finally, for staying power, I'll quote myself again! "Look at FFmpeg or ImageMagick. They are libraries that just _won't die_, no matter how hard people have tried. My god, ImageMagick was written in 1987, and it now has Haskell bindings[0]! The only way to get that sort of longevity (and old code is good code, after all [1]) is to write in language that will outlast the ups and downs of the language or framework du jour, and C and C++ have proven to have that staying power." [0] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/imagemagick http://hackage.haskell.org/package/imagemagick [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html