Comment Re:Objects... (Score 1) 237
The main slow downs you will see in your average C++ program, over the corresponding C, is the use of the string class as opposed to the nasty but fast strcpy and friends,[...]
I cannot agree with this. I have seen, more than once, very noticeable performance improvements in my applications when migrating to C++ strings (after migrating to C++). The main reasons are that (1) the string length is directly stored in the object and available in O(1) time (while strlen(), strcat() and strdup() have to walk over the string, so they are O(n)); (2) most good implementations of std::string use copy-on-write behind the scenes, and are generally very well optimized (since almost all applications use strings, library designers tend to focus on this class); and (3) std::string may (and most implementations do) use better and more efficient ways to allocate and reallocate memory (like using memory pools).
