2-3x slower? I guess it depends on what you're doing. For a lot of code I've dealt with the differences in performance have been factional.
1) You wrote that code in BOTH Java and C++, optimized both, and compared their running times.
2) Said code was CPU bound. For heavy IO bound code you could even use TCL and get "fractional" differences.
See http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php...