VB Speed compared to VC++ Speed.

I was curious tonight to find a Relative speed difference between Visual Basic and Visual C++. So I recorded the Second and Millisecond before and after the operation of adding 1 to a Long 1 million times.

Visual Basic took 230-260 Milliseconds to do this.
Visual C++ took 10 Milliseconds to do this.

So Visual C++ is at relatively 26x faster then Visual Basic in just adding Integeres together.

I thought that some people might find this information... interesting.

The machine that it was tested on was an AMD K6 550Mhz, Slot A. 192 MB of SDRAM 100Mhz.

This is true. But not a perfect test, because adding two integers in VB is not the same as adding two integers in VC. VB does overflow checks, that is when you add two integers in VB that would be larger than an integer together, it will throw an exception. In VC, it will simply let the value of the result overflow.

In general, for computing, C is much faster than VB, maybe 10 times average. That is partly because VB itself is slow, but also because it has security precautions build in that C programmers have to build themselves ( and simply omit for those comparisons ).

Okay, I'll cancel overflow checks. Its a compile options. Thanks for bringing it up, I didn't even think about that.

My lecturer told me something to do with the fact that BASIC runs line for line at runtime, and a C++ program is compiled top-down, in this fashion, therefore when it is run the program will run reletively faster than that of a program which does exactly the samething in BASIC.

But BASIC is generally used by proffesionals to give examples of their work

Just a thought...

My lecturer told me something to do with the fact that BASIC runs line for line at runtime, and a C++ program is compiled top-down

While this is pretty common for many Basic implementations (not VB for a while), it is not something defined by a particaular language. You could create an "interpreted C++" rather than a compiled one if you really wanted.

When something is compiled then the Execution is actually... compiled. Its not a script. However in TI-83 Calculators for example an ASM/FLASH application will be faster because the Basic Code for the calculators is compiled into ASM then executed line by line.

howdy,
very interesting...
i have heard the difference is only 2%.

M.R.