Both languages have their limitations. I remember reading one Benchmark years ago, where they implemented a text-file processing problem in different languages. The ranking was as follows:

1. C
2. Perl
3. C++
4. Java

Now, if I could just remember the reference...

Of course, comparing languages can be rather arbitrary. You have to make sure your implementations are really equivalent (for example, a C++ array is not equivalent to a Perl array).