Hi lads, I'm a rising high school senior who wants to get into competitive programming. For such competitions, C++ is overwhelmingly used because it's very efficient and has a lot of available data structures as compared to some other languages like Java. The problem is that Java is currently the language I'm most comfortable with, as I took AP Computer Science this school year. But I also took a course on C++ back in 9th grade, so I'm faced with a conundrum:

I could stick with Java - this would mean I don't have to invest time and effort into re-learning C++ and could instead just focus solely on learning the data structures and algorithms I need to do well in competitions. However, I would be at a disadvantage in every competition as my language is less efficient and I don't have the wiggle room to write sub-optimal code.

I could make the switch to C++ - this would mean I'll have to invest time and effort into re-learning the language and then learning data structures and algorithms on top of that. However, learning the language won't be as hard as learning it completely from scratch because I used to code in C++ a couple years ago. This would also give me the wiggle room I talked about earlier. I was also planning to re-learn this language at some point regardless because it's good for making games and stuff

Another factor which might be important: I would ideally like to score well on a coding competition in 3 months or less so I could put it on my college application. This is probably impossible in such a short time but the point is I want the option that's most likely to get me positive results quickly.

Tell me what u guys think, thx :)