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When performance matters...

Russell · 2004-04-13T18:36:08

...what are the realistic possibilities when choosing a programming language? Assembly language is probably not a good choice. Most people don''t know it or the computer''s architecture well enough to optimize better than the compiler, plus it makes for a less mentally managable program. And then in a few years when a new generation of processors come out... ugh. C is a good choice when speed matters, obviously. C++ is a good choice, so long as you don''t do anything bone headed. So we have C, and C++ which will basically run at the same speed as a program written in C on today''s compilers. What else? C# is a nice language (I really like it). But whether or not it is good for a speed critical app is up in the air at best, I think. Every benchmark comparing C/C++ to C# and Java tells a different story. Some show C# to be within a few percent of natively compiled C/C++, while others show it to be significantly slower than Java, which is shown to be significantly slower than natively compiled C/C++. Some languages seem to offer very good performance, like O''Caml, but I don''t think that these languages offer enough control to really get maximum performance. As an example, if you are writing a program to take advantage of a multi-cpu Opteron, you had better have control over which processes/threads get run on which processor or you are going to kill the multi-cpu performance (since Opteron is NUMA based). I don''t think you can have that kind of control in any language that is garbage collected, can you? I do recall seeing some kind of processor afinity stuff in C#, so maybe it is possible. So we''re back to C and C++. Surely that is not all...

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by Russell April 13, 2004 12:46 AM

12 comments, last by Russell 20 years ago

Russell

118

Author

April 13, 2004 04:48 PM

quote:Original post by antareus
So you took a well-known native version and pitted it against a quick C# implementation and was disappointed when it didn''t measure up?

I wouldn''t call it a "quick C# implementation." Someone else spent several months implementing it. I only spent a few minutes compiling it and running well known computer chess benchmarks to test the speed of it. If you want to try it yourself, download the source code: #Chess. Compare that with Crafty. Crafty isn''t even a particuarly fast program as far as dumb bean counting goes. I could write something a good deal faster if speed is all we are testing (and not how well it plays chess).

bytecoder

100

April 13, 2004 05:35 PM

Have you looked into the D programming language? It looks like a nice balance between power and how clean it is. In my opinion, C++ just seems very bloated compared to C and D.