Thread: How do I make a GUI interface?

I'm with Elysia on this. I have worked on C++ projects that are WELL optimized and would be very hard to manage to do with C - one involved emulating the exact behaviour of a chip, where a 5-bit register had to be a 5-bit register. Doing this:

Code:

   int5 x, y;
   ... 
   x = getsomething();
   y = getother();
   x += y;

in C and maintaining a 5-bit value would not be nice.

I was asked by one of the senior managers if I thought we could speed it up by using C instead. My answer was "Probably less than 5%, and it would take far longer to achieve that, than it would take to save 5% by optimizing certain parts of the code". I spent several weeks profiling, analyzing the profiles, and improving the performance. One of the biggest gains was to put if-statements around certain logging calls [that normally didn't get output, so we'd check the output limit FIRST, then call the logging function ONLY if there was actually going to be an output. Just "calling a function that would just return" caused a whole lot of overhead].

C++ as such is not slow. It can be written in a way that produces slow and bulky code. Using STL is a choice that often introduces extra code and extra execution time - which is fine if your application is not terribly time critical, where time-to-market is more important, etc. As usual, it's often just a small portion of the code that is really performance criticial, and if necessary, you could always write THAT BIT in Assembler, plain C or whatever you think will give sufficient benefit.

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Mats

I'm with you Bubba. There was a time, a long while back, when I thought you couldn't write C++ OS code, but I'm convinced now that it's perfectly possible. It just requires a good steady skill of OOD, and some good thinking [and the latter is definitely needed if you want to do an OS in C too!]

Originally Posted by Bubba

I'm finding more often than not the people who make this claim are the same bunch that love to reinvent the wheel.

Either that, or the people who have yet to do some serious programming in C++.

And I think, because C++ offers a richer set of functionality to the user, it can be confusing to new users. You definitely need more experience as a C++ programmer than you do as a C programmer, to write and maintain code well. At least, that's my opinion.

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Mats

Originally Posted by Elysia

On the other hand, C++ code can be much easier to read than eqalient C code, so it's a good thing.

Depends on who wrote it, I'd say - and that goes for both C and C++. You can write messy code in both languages - in fact, it's probably easier to do in C++ [just look at the examples with virtual functions and default arguments for some ways to obfuscate the code].

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Mats