Allen, On Tuesday 08 November 2005 13:00, Allen wrote:
On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 08:19:09PM +0200, Andre Truter wrote:
On 11/8/05, Steven T. Hatton
wrote: ...
Since I have absolutely no delays with the mouse using the KDE, I can't compare that to anyting. As for the underlying language used, yes, the GNOME is written in C, not C++. If anything, that means it will be slower if both languages are utilized to their fullest reasonable extent.
Umm.. How do you get that? It is rather the other way around. C++ apps are generally slower. Why is the Linux kernel written in C? If C++ was faster, then would that not have made sense?
The fact is actually that one cannot really say that the one language is faster than the other, becuase the speed all depends on the implementation and what you want to do.
A myth usually shown false with a little assembler.
That's irrelevant, because code written in assembly has little or no portability to other platforms and often marginal portability to other processors in the same family. And programmer productivity writing in assembler is abysmal. And believe it or not, assembly code is not always the fastest. It may hold the most potential for execution speed under some idealized set of assumptions, but that's neither here nor there in the world of real software engineering. Just as Java's dynamic native code generation can perform optimizations no static C++ optimizer can, assembly code can only be statically optimized. That limits the ways and degrees to which it can be optimized for real-world dynamic situations. There's some code that can be statically and universally optimized (memcpy, perhaps) but much that cannot. Randall Schulz