4 ms·

C# versus C++ performance

10 points by swah 13y ago

comex 13y ago
Not to be ad hominem, but why do these posts advocating garbage collected languages keep making exaggerated claims? F# certainly is capable of expressing code more succinctly than C++, but 6,000 versus 1,000,000 lines is far beyond what that difference could account for; the code could presumably have been rewritten in much less C++ as well. Nor, in all likelihood, would it "have taken man-decades of work by real experts and cost millions of pounds" to get "better performance"; quite possibly it would to get to near-optimal performance, but compared to F#, it would probably be relatively easy for a skilled C++ developer (and the author does seem to be a skilled F# developer) to get better performance. shared_ptr has issues, and in many respects is significantly inferior to a real garbage counter, but the post downplays the extent to which idiomatic C++ code avoids use of shared_ptr in most circumstances. You can write Java in any language... The claim that scope-based reference counting can keep garbage around for longer than necessary is strictly true but seems absurd to argue with, as the time between end-of-use and end-of-scope is usually rather short. The linked post (http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/memory-management-myths-promptness.html http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/memory-management...) attempts to illustrate this, but uses a completely illogical/pathological example.
- swah 13y ago
  I agree with you, maybe Jon Skeet (the top user on StackOverflow and a googler, IIRC) exagerated - he didn't even use Lisp :)
tcbawo 13y ago
In a trading environment, the question of C# vs C++ is probably moot. The low latency trading languages of the future will probably be Verilog and VHDL.
- officialjunk 13y ago
  FPGA's and ASIC's are the only context I know for verilog and VHDL. Do you mean hardware solutions?
  - tcbawo 13y ago
    Yes. Trading is: first a network game, second a hardware game, third a math game, fourth a software game.

10 points by swah 13y ago

comex 13y ago

Not to be ad hominem, but why do these posts advocating garbage collected languages keep making exaggerated claims? F# certainly is capable of expressing code more succinctly than C++, but 6,000 versus 1,000,000 lines is far beyond what that difference could account for; the code could presumably have been rewritten in much less C++ as well. Nor, in all likelihood, would it "have taken man-decades of work by real experts and cost millions of pounds" to get "better performance"; quite possibly it would to get to near-optimal performance, but compared to F#, it would probably be relatively easy for a skilled C++ developer (and the author does seem to be a skilled F# developer) to get better performance. shared_ptr has issues, and in many respects is significantly inferior to a real garbage counter, but the post downplays the extent to which idiomatic C++ code avoids use of shared_ptr in most circumstances. You can write Java in any language... The claim that scope-based reference counting can keep garbage around for longer than necessary is strictly true but seems absurd to argue with, as the time between end-of-use and end-of-scope is usually rather short. The linked post (http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/memory-management-myths-promptness.html http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/memory-management...) attempts to illustrate this, but uses a completely illogical/pathological example.

swah 13y ago
I agree with you, maybe Jon Skeet (the top user on StackOverflow and a googler, IIRC) exagerated - he didn't even use Lisp :)

tcbawo 13y ago

In a trading environment, the question of C# vs C++ is probably moot. The low latency trading languages of the future will probably be Verilog and VHDL.

officialjunk 13y ago
FPGA's and ASIC's are the only context I know for verilog and VHDL. Do you mean hardware solutions?
- tcbawo 13y ago
  Yes. Trading is: first a network game, second a hardware game, third a math game, fourth a software game.