Originally Posted by pianorain
Yes, C# can be used for rapid application development. However, that doesn't mean that the speed at run-time is slower than C++ applications. On the contrary, C# applications can often be faster than C++ applications. This is due to the .Net garbage collection vs explicit new/deletes. Run a profiler on a significant C++ app; you'll find an inordinate amount of time being spent allocating and deallocating memory. In any .Net language, the garbage collector not only ensures that you don't have memory leaks, but it also relieves constant thrashing and fragmentation of memory. Further, C# is not limited to rapid application development. From an implementation standpoint, you can do just about anything in C# that you can do in C++.