Look,
I love C++ and I'd love to say look I told you all, C++ is the fastest,
but frankly it just doesn't work like that. When we come to a point where
every programmer writes the fastest possible code their language could
create then we have some kind of a comparison.
C++ has a philosophy that you don't pay for what you don't use, but there is
not a single construct in C++ that can't be built in C with enough code
(virtual functions are a grey area since the compiler can better optimizer
them over direct function pointers... but that is irrelevant anyway).
Sometimes the amount of code is rediculous and frequently to obtain the same
speeds one has to sacrifice portability and reusability.
In theory, and ONLY in theory, assembly is the fastest programming
language. The fact is, in a sufficiently complex program, there will always
be parts of the program left to further optimize. I would assert that for a
complex program, an assembly programmer and a C++ programmer both writing
the same program and spending the same amount of time will leave the
assembly version slower always. It is not because assembly is a slower
language, it is because if the assembly guy spends another 1000 hours
optimizing, so will the C++ guy and certainly their are exceptions, but in
general, for most problems and for reasonable amounts of time spent, the C++
code will be faster.
C++ is "faster" than C because the STL (and other generic code) allows the
programmer to spend their precious time optimizing the bottleneck and using
a very fast default for less critical places. For a sufficiently small
program however I will wager that given enough time, C will be exactly the
same speed as C++ if the programmers involved are both good.
When will you people learn the limits of benchmarks? They are only useful
for showing how worthless Java is... nothing else. Got it?
- Nick
On Dec 15, 2007 2:44 AM, Darren Cook <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >> I thinks it's very difficult to outperform C since C really is just
> >> about at the level of assembly language.
> >
> > No, in special cases it's not that hard to outperform C, because the
> > language spec dictates some not so efficient details. C has an ABI and
> > it's specification is optimized for the general case.
>
> Stefan, judging by this site (which I posted some links from yesterday)
> your intuition is correct:
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
>
> Overall C comes in 2nd, 10% slower than C++ (due to extra hints to the
> compiler I assume). But C/C++ are not the top of every benchmark. E.g.
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=sumcol&lang=all
>
> Darren
>
>
> --
> Darren Cook
> http://dcook.org/mlsn/ (English-Japanese-German-Chinese free dictionary)
> http://dcook.org/work/ (About me and my work)
> http://dcook.org/work/charts/ (My flash charting demos)
> _______________________________________________
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> computer-go@computer-go.org
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>
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