That's fair! I would assume that was due to your comfort zone and muscle memory. Not because you found Java to be harder than C++. Usually a higher level language is easier to grasp, handle and manage than a lower level one.
C++ the language is exceptionally complicated, but the ecosystem is relatively simple
Java is the opposite, the language itself is simple enough but the ecosystem is humongous (spring/J2EE, maven/gradle, n^2 logging frameworks/adapters, application servers, anything involving classloaders/annotation processing/dynamic bytecode manipulation, ...)
syntactically they look similar, but other than that there's not much in the way of transferable skills between the two
Totally agree! Because of the zero-garbage and no-gc requirement we don't even use the JDK. We use Java as syntax language and write everything from scratch, even the data structures (java.util.HashMap produces garbage). So the bloated Java ecosystem does not affect us too much.
