One of the cooler projects I believe out there in the open source world is Clang — a ground-up implementation of a C/C++ front-end for LLVM. Thanks to a status message by Joel Falcou I looked at the cfe-dev mailing list archive and found this:
I decided to see how well clang++ currently does at compiling boost.headers on my linux box. So I took all the files from /usr/include/boost and compiled them. In my test it turns out that clang successfully compiled about 80% of the boost headers.
80% of Boost? That’s not bad at all.
Just after writing a piece about how C++ can be faster than C, I run into this article that speaks about how C is better than C++. Adam Smith writes:
It has been claimed that C++ is a better C them [sic] C. this is being taken to mean that when switching to C++ you can continue to code more or less as she did in C and use a little extra C++ functionality for convenience. The problem with that is that a lot of things which are perfectly safe to do and see are not safe to do while using C++. So here is my list of issues not found in C. You can avoid many of these issues in C++ by limiting what features you use. But you never have any guarantees. You can’t pick up random C++ code, look at it and be certain whether it is doing something safe or not when e.g. statically initializing a variable.
He posts a list of things on his entry which I personally would like to address in this post.
Alex Ott wrote a fascinating blog post about Boost.Spirit v2.x’s integer parser performance compared to standard C’s ‘atoi’, in one example of how C++ is faster than C in some cases. He writes:
I did very primitive test of performance for new version of boost.spirit. I read somewhere, that boost.spirit v.2 over-performs atoi on parsing of integers, and I decided to check this with help of program, shown below. With compilation in release mode, and for 10000000 iterations, I got following results…
And when you read on his post, you may be surprised about his findings. Shocked even.
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C++ Developer with years of experience building high performance applications and implementing multi-threaded highly scalable systems.Recommended Reading
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