But these are all tredeoffs, that make C# almost as complex as C++. Sure, there are cases where these low-level optimizations allow for better performance, but don’t forget that the more things we specify, the less freedom does the runtime have. SQL is a good example here, it specifies the what and not the how, and this makes a good db very hard to beat on complex queries.

The way I have seen it described somewhere: C# has a slightly higher performance ceiling, but a naive application may very well run faster in Java.