Re: To all german speaking 'steppers: article in german C'tmagazine <VirusChecked>

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

Hi,

I agree with Helge on this, I do not think it make much sense to write 
such a letter... but on the other hand, if it is a well written 
addition to this article and not a flame against C++ then it won't 
cause any harm either :-)

On Wednesday, May 21, 2003, at 09:50 PM, Stefan Böhringer wrote:
> > I'm going to be quite honest here: that seems like a really good idea
> > when we compare it to the ObjC way of wrapping C types with NSValues
> > and numbers with NSNumbers, which BTW can be a real performance hit.
>
> And to me it doesn't seem to be a good idea. One can argue about this
> from the performance point of view. This boils down to the general
> question of performance of C++ vs. Objective-C. In this group it is
> understood that Objective-C may need some hand tuning when performance
> is really critical. If, however, a clean design is implemented C++ will
> perform equal or worse to Objective-C. Also there are floating around
> class implementations to hold arrays of c-structs (My personal class is
> NSDataArray), which are even quicker than a C++-template.

Why should a clean C++ design be slower than a clean ObjC design? And C 
structs can perfectly be used in C++ as well, of course, this is not an 
argument for or against templates...

> The deeper reason for templates is, that C++ used to be crippled before
> templates were introduces. How would one implement an array of ints? Go
> ahead and write your addInt(), intAtIndex(),... methods. Now, what to 
> do
> with floats? Do another class. This generalizes to Templates where the
> class is another argument.
> C++ has termendous difficulties to handle container classes (classes
> holding other classes). This led to the enormous complexity of the STL
> (standard templates libraries; http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl) which
> implements virtually hundrets of classes to perform what NSArray,
> NSDictionary, NSSet, NSEnumerator do.

C++ has absolutely no difficulties in handling container classes nor 
does STL implement hundreds of container classes. On the other hand, 
NSArray et al. are often implemented as class clusters and thus there 
are more implementations than you generally see. But then, of course is 
the FoundationKit easier to use, this is IMHO no question :-)

But of course does the different nature of C++ result in different 
approaches and design solutions. And although it is much more difficult 
to write good C++ code, this does not mean that you cannot do it!

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip