I don't agree with how you define "apples". I would define an apples to apples comparison as "How would a typical C developer write this test? How would a typ

I don't agree with how you define "apples". I would define an apples to apples comparison as "How would a typical C developer write this test? How would a typical C++ developer write this test?" A typical C developer would use a library function. A typical C++ developer would use the stl. This was a great article for me because I am actually about to write some very performance intensive data manipulation code that will use sorting and other similar algorithms. I was thinking about doing it in C because I always mentally associate C with performance. This article is a reminder to me that although I could eventually laboriously hand-tweak the C to be performant, there are things in C++ that will perform better than C without my even having to do much optimization, if any.