> No. Because it's not just a performance comparison, really. Without realising it, it's also a learning test. The very fact they wrote sub-par C++ code, likely without realising it, and then proceeded to produce (sub-par?

Who or what tell you it's a learning test ? It is a pretty weak asumption.

The publication says nothing on the actual past experience of the developers in every language. They might very well be experienced in Go or Java.

From their C++, It is pretty obvious it is not their main language.

In my experience, this kind of code of nested shared_ptr everywhere is pretty typical of developers with a Java background just starting C++.