Did some more porting this weekend... C++ version is now able to load & render a character model from my HTML5 Canvas demo (far right screenshot, in Chrome). A few glitches to debug, but it's basically done. Performance is better indeed... 3% CPU with one character, probably 10% during busy gameplay -- versus 60% in HTML5.
Next: animations, keyboard/gamepad controls, and collisions.
Hoping it won't be a total pain to do a Windows build so I can run this on my laptop at a local gamedev get-together on Tuesday.
Allright, I got a Windows build working, thanks in part to some tips on GDnet... but man, that VS2012 IDE sucks! How can anyone stand it?? o_O
Going forward I'll use commandline MSVC or MSYS or Clang. I just started using CMake on the Linux side and it'll make things a hell of a lot easier on the Windows side.