I hear that argument a lot, and yet I have never seen real-life software that runs comparably in Java and C++. For example, a few weeks ago, I was looking at some (fairly simple) data processing code backed by SQLite. The Java version was too slow for the amount of data that needed to get analyzed and reanalyzed repeatedly. A rewrite in C++, with no special trickery, ran 3x faster.

After isolating everything in Java (including ditching the JDBC driver for lower-level SQLite bindings), nothing changed. It was likely JNI overhead, but frankly, that doesn't matter: Java was too slow. No sophisticated benchmarks here — just real-life production code that runs like molasses in the JVM and runs acceptably in C++.

Also, C++11 is not a low-level language anymore. (And I say this as a long-time Lisp and Clojure programmer.)