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Seeking Multi-Platform I/O Libraries?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm just getting ready to plunge into a new project, and joy of joys have been given complete freedom when it comes to the implementation language - so long as the program will build and run on both x86 Linux and Windows. Now, I don't need a GUI, this is systems stuff only (processing binary executables in fact, so lots of bitfiddling and big nasty algorithms over hairy data structures) so pretty much all I need are standard IO libraries. C is currently at the top of my list..but what other language should I be looking at? I'm happy to learn a new one, and have the go ahead to do it..like I say, they want absolute speed. Can someone suggest a better language? C++ is out, it does come with a speed hit (using C++ properly anyway, not as a
souped-up C). If I'm gonna take the speed hit, I
may as well consider something like Ocaml which might let me claw the speed back with better algorithms and data structures.."
Yes, I would really recommend O'Caml. Here's why:
If you just write the same program you would have written in C, the speed will be quite good, probably about 20% CPU-slower than C. (And if your program is IO-heavy, you might not notice this at all.)
If you have any sort of limited time or interest (as most projects do), you'll be able to write a much better program in O'Caml than you would in C, because:
- Because it's safe, you won't need to ever spend time tracking down or debugging core dumps or memory leaks. Because it's statically typed, a large percentage of bugs are caught at compile-time.
- If your program is interacting with the network, you won't need to worry about buffer overflows, format string bugs, or most of the common security problems.
- O'Caml has a much richer core language than C, with support for algebraic datatypes, pattern matching, higher-order functions, threads, modules, and objects. You can do a lot of great stuff with these.
- O'Caml has a nicer (though not as nice as, say, SML) module system, which keeps your program from getting unmanageable, and helps isolate faults to a particular module.
And by better, I also mean faster -- development wisdom says that algorithms and data structures are what matter most, not just the instruction-level efficiency of your code.
Of course, if you don't know the language, then it will have a higher startup cost for you. But I think it's worth it; you'll learn a different programming style that can help you think in new ways even when you're writing code in Old School languages. =)
Even though you have it right that it is a misconception that C++ is slower than C, you miss one very importatnt point: the supposedly slower features of C++ (like virtual functions) do not have an equivalent in C. In fact, in order to achieve the same functionality in C, you will have to hand code what the compiler already does for you in C++. But we already know that compilers are better than humans in avoiding errors and applying the same solution over and over with good efficiency.
Moreover, because the compiler knows what you're actually trying to do, it can often perform optimizations that are not possible in C. For the example of virtual function calls, the equivalent in C (both in terms of functionality and efficiency) is calls using function pointers. The difference is that in C++ the compiler often knows the dynamic type of an object (if it's an actual object and not a pointer or reference) and can optimize away the virtual function call and replace it with a static call (or even inline the function). The C compiler is unable to do that.
So yes, there are features in C++ that have a performance penalty, but they have no equivalent in C, so the comparison is invalid.
As for ocaml or other FP languages, I think it's a good idea to try them. Besides the productivity and maintainability gains, you may also have actual efficiency benefits. Again, because the compiler knows what you're trying to do in a high(er) level language, sometimes it can perform obscure but very effective optimizations that can beat what an average or even good C programmer can do.