Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!mcdchg!chinet!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!alice!bs
From: bs@alice.UUCP (Bjarne Stroustrup)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: C++ : A free lunch ?
Summary: can be BETTER than a free lunch
Message-ID: <8371@alice.UUCP>
Date: 29 Oct 88 14:37:47 GMT
References: <4165@tekgvs.GVS.TEK.COM>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ
Lines: 20



tekcrl.TEK.COM writes

 > in order to make best use of its object-oriented features you should count on 
 > the run-time overhead that virtual functions, constructors, and destructors 
 > impose.

However, this ``overhead'' may actually not be ``overhead'' compared with
the code you have to write in a traditional C program doing a similar job:

See Vince Russo's paper about a Scheme interpreter written in C and then
rewritten in C++ using a basic object-oriented style. The rewrite was done
because of a bet that ``C++ with an OO style isn't much slower than C''.
Russo won: the C++ program consistently ran faster. I especially enjoyed
Russo's comments that ``it was easy to see how to improve the algorithms
to make the progem run MUCH faster, but we didn't do that because that
would have been cheating'' (or words to that effect). The paper can be
found in the proceedings of the Denver USENIX C++ conference.