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Performance

All the cleverness in the world is useless if the resulting design performs poorly. This in fact is where we met the most resistence from C programmers. The premise of most criticism is that C++ code leads to inferior executables, either bloated by support for C++ capabilities, or somehow merely unoptimizable.

Much effort went into proving by example that tight and efficient C++ code is certainly possible. Since we chose to stick with a specific compiler, we had the luxury of studying the output assembly code and working it until the assembly couldn't be further improved. That experience has led to some generalizations.





Stephen Williams
Sun May 4 15:28:26 PDT 1997