re-writing college books [was: Re: A banner year for software bugs | Tech News on ZDNet]

[dcrocker at eschertech.com (David Crocker)]

Crispin,

It is most certainly true that C++ can be appropriate in those cases. C++
programs can perform just as well as C programs, while also being much better
structured. Of course, it will be necessary to avoid performing frequent
allocation and deallocation of heap memory in the C++ program - but the same is
true of C programs. Poorly-performing programs can be written in either
language.

David Crocker, Escher Technologies Ltd.
Consultancy, contracting and tools for dependable software development
www.eschertech.com



-----Original Message-----
From: Crispin Cowan [mailto:crispin at novell.com] 
Sent: 03 November 2006 04:46
To: David Crocker
Cc: 'Secure Coding'
Subject: Re: [SC-L] re-writing college books [was: Re: A banner year for
software bugs | Tech News on ZDNet]


David Crocker wrote:
> Unfortunately, there are at least two situations in which C++ is a 
> more suitable alternative to Java and C#:
>
> - Where performance is critical. Run time of C# code (using the faster 
> .NET 2.0
> runtime) can be as much as double the run time of a C++ version of the same
> algorithm. Try telling a large company that it must double the size of its
> compute farms so you can switch to a "better" programming language!
>
> - In hard real-time applications where garbage collection pauses 
> cannot be tolerated.
>   
Except that in both of those cases, C++ is not appropriate either. That is a
case for C.

Crispin

-- 
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.                      http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/
Director of Software Engineering, Novell  http://novell.com
     Hack: adroit engineering solution to an unanticipated problem
     Hacker: one who is adroit at pounding round pegs into square holes