[kunley]

"With this arguing, isn't it reasonable to assume that a project Foo written in C or C++ is faster than an equivalent written in Java simply because the author writing project Foo in C/C++ likely understands performance by choosing C/C++ in the first place? (I am not saying anything about the performance of a certain language implementation)"

The point is that if someone is able to choose C/C++ means that he's much more smarter than many existing Java programmers.

Sad but true.