I'd consider myself a 'C++ programmer' - I've used it for years, it works very well for me for what I do with it, etc. However, what I find most frustrating is

I'd consider myself a 'C++ programmer' - I've used it for years, it works very well for me for what I do with it, etc. However, what I find most frustrating is that nothing is intuitive. And there is always a reason for why it is like that, I know. My favorite example is the erase/remove idiom. Anyway, here is a question about C++. Last week I tried to implement a parser for a subset of CSV - one-byte-per-character, fields separated by comma, no quoting, fixed line ending. The only requirement was speed. So I started with a simple C++-style implementation, read one line at a time with std::getline, split with boost tokenizer, copy into vector of vector of string. But it was too slow, so I reimplemented it C-style - boom, first try, 30 times faster. Through some micro-optimisations I got it 30% faster still - copying less, adding some const left and right, caching a pointer. So if anyone is so inclined, how would I make the following more C++-ish and still get the same speed? Using fopen and raw char* to iterate over the memory buffer are what I'd consider the non-C++ aspects of it, but feel free to point out other idiom violations... bool CsvParser::OpenCStyle(boost::filesystem::path path) { FILE* fh = NULL; ::fopen_s(&fh, path.string().c_str(), "rb"); if (fh == NULL) { return false; } const int BUFSIZE = 1024 * 256; char buf[BUFSIZE]; m_Records.reserve(m_EstimatedRecordCount); bool at_end_of_file = false; std::string carryover_field_data; std::vector<std::string>* current_line = NULL; bool at_new_line = true; const char separator = m_Separator; while (!feof(fh)) { size_t size_read = ::fread(buf, sizeof(char), BUFSIZE, fh); char* start_of_field = buf; size_t i = 0; for (i = 0 ; i < BUFSIZE && i < size_read ; i++) { if (at_new_line) { m_Records.push_back(std::vector<std::string>()); current_line = &m_Records.back(); at_new_line = false; } if (buf[i] == separator || (at_new_line = (buf[i] == '\n'))) { current_line->push_back(std::string()); if (carryover_field_data.size() != 0) { std::string field(start_of_field, &buf[i] - start_of_field); m_Records.back().push_back(carryover_field_data + field); carryover_field_data = ""; } else { current_line->back().assign(start_of_field, &buf[i] - start_of_field); } start_of_field = &buf[i + 1]; } } carryover_field_data = std::string(start_of_field, &buf[i] - start_of_field); } fclose(fh); return true; }