Re: is C necessarily faster than C++

tbrannon <tbrannon@mars.mars.eecs.lehigh.edu> wrote:
>This guy in my lab keeps refusing to use C++ in our program intended
>to simulate somatosensory neural circuits because he says it is slower
>than C. My (uninformed) response was that most of what you see as
>overhead (ie, message routing, value accessing, type checking) is
>optimized away at compile-time.
>
>Any pointers to more empirical studies?


The one that I happen to be familiar with is:


"A C++ Interpreter for Scheme"
Vincent F. Russo & Simon M. Kaplan
1988 USENIX C++ Conference Proceedings
Denver, Colorado
October 17-21, 1988
pp. 95-108


OK. I _know_ that doesn't _sound_ like what you had in mind, but read it.
It is an experience report on converting a particular large program (i.e.
a Scheme interpreter) from C to C++, along with before & after performance
measurements. The conclusion was that if you write good C++ code, it can
be _faster_ than the (roughly) equivalent C code.


{Please don't take that as a personal recommendation to use C++. It isn't
for everybody.}


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