Re: Reasons for a Web Developer to use Lua?

[David Favro <lua@...>]

On 03/16/2011 11:58 AM, Tim Johnson wrote:
>   When I began transitioning from C to C++, I experimented with
>   writing small applications compiled/linked in both C and C++ and
>   noted that C++ source generated much larger binaries. By examining
>   the binaries, I could see that a lot of the extra bytes in the C++
>   binaries were the result of munging for overloaded functions.

man strip
That's not what I call "binaries."

>   I am related to a developer for Microsoft. He says that the use of
>   C++ is favored by higher-ups because the greater OOP approach of
>   C++ translates better to team development, but assets that both C
>   and assembler are used in bottlenecks.

Assembler might make sense, but using C rather than C++ for "bottlenecks"
makes no sense since C++ is (essentially) a superset of C, i.e. any C
program is itself (almost) a C++ program, and typically if C code is
compiled with a C++ compiler rather than a C compiler (with the same
code-generation/optimization back-end, e.g. cfront+cc vs. cc alone, or g++
vs. gcc) will generate essentially the same (or, more often, exactly the
same) object code, modulo symbols.  This was, in fact, one of the design
goals of the language.

So maybe your MS friend should have said that he uses a different C++ coding
style (perhaps avoiding certain higher-level abstractions, virtual methods,
exceptions) for performance-critical routines or inside that inner inner
loop.  Switching compilers is not going to make any difference at all.

Furthermore, in many (but not all) cases that I see people reverting to "C
style" or assembler code rather than C++ "because I needed the efficiency,"
they could have accomplished far better performance gains by avoiding really
stupid choice of algorithms, data structures, and coding practices, in favor
of more efficient ones.  I see a lot of atrociously inefficient C code with
the developer bragging about how efficient it is "because it's in C."

-- David