Re: OT: Open letter to the Linux World

[Alexander Holler <holler@ahsoftware.de>]

Am 04.09.2014 16:36, schrieb Austin S Hemmelgarn:
> On 2014-09-04 06:16, Alexander Holler wrote:
>>
>> It's a myth that C++ ends up in bigger code than C. At least in my
>> experience. Especially when the latest additions to C++ are in effect
>> (like the move-semantics in C++11 I like quiet a lot and which you get
>> almost for free (by changing nothing) when you use the STL). Thread
>> support is now also standardized (in C++11), quiet nice to use.

> Assuming you are writing in a standalone environment (no standard
> libraries), then yes, your code will usually be about the same size
> (unless you go way overboard with the object-oriented stuff); but the
> runtime is larger in almost all non-standalone environments, and there
> are some cases that code does end up larger in C++.  A lot of 'Clean C'
> (stuff written so that it compiles correctly as C, C++ and Objective C)
> that I have seen seems to end up larger (by about 4-6%) when built as
> C++ (although it usually does much worse as Objective C).

There are always corner cases and I never would use some "Clean C" code 
to compare sizes of C and C++. There is a whole lot of stuff you just 
can't, shouldn't or wouldn't do when using C instead of C++.

And just throwing in some numbers without any explanation about features 
(like exceptions), optimizations and so on you've enabled for the tests 
you used to get those numbers, doesn't work. ;)

I can't really comment on what you mean with "standalone environment" or 
"non-standalone environment", as I don't know what you mean with that. 
But if several programms share e.g. the stuff which is in libstdc++. 
you'll get a lot of size back when compared with C-only programms where 
everyone invents the wheel again and again.

Regards,

Alexander Holler