Re: OT: Open letter to the Linux World

From: Alexander Holler
Date: Thu Sep 04 2014 - 13:29:50 EST


Am 04.09.2014 16:36, schrieb Austin S Hemmelgarn:
On 2014-09-04 06:16, Alexander Holler wrote:

It's a myth that C++ ends up in bigger code than C. At least in my
experience. Especially when the latest additions to C++ are in effect
(like the move-semantics in C++11 I like quiet a lot and which you get
almost for free (by changing nothing) when you use the STL). Thread
support is now also standardized (in C++11), quiet nice to use.

Assuming you are writing in a standalone environment (no standard
libraries), then yes, your code will usually be about the same size
(unless you go way overboard with the object-oriented stuff); but the
runtime is larger in almost all non-standalone environments, and there
are some cases that code does end up larger in C++. A lot of 'Clean C'
(stuff written so that it compiles correctly as C, C++ and Objective C)
that I have seen seems to end up larger (by about 4-6%) when built as
C++ (although it usually does much worse as Objective C).

There are always corner cases and I never would use some "Clean C" code to compare sizes of C and C++. There is a whole lot of stuff you just can't, shouldn't or wouldn't do when using C instead of C++.

And just throwing in some numbers without any explanation about features (like exceptions), optimizations and so on you've enabled for the tests you used to get those numbers, doesn't work. ;)

I can't really comment on what you mean with "standalone environment" or "non-standalone environment", as I don't know what you mean with that. But if several programms share e.g. the stuff which is in libstdc++. you'll get a lot of size back when compared with C-only programms where everyone invents the wheel again and again.

Regards,

Alexander Holler
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