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Does C# Measure Up?
An anonymous reader queries: "Windows::Developer is offering a detailed, quantitative examination [free login required] of C#'s performance versus Java, C, C++ and D. 'Overall the results were surprising, although perhaps unexciting, in showing that C# (and to a less extent Java) is, to a good degree, on a par in efficiency terms with its older and (presumed to be) more efficient counterparts C and C++ at least as far as the basic language features compared in this analysis are concerned,' writes the author, Matthew Wilson. I'm only an amateur coder, and confess to not understanding most of the two-part article. I'd love to hear how true programmers view his results, which are too wide-ranging to summarize easily here. How about it Slashdot, as this special edition asks, 'Can C# keep up with compiled languages like C, C++, and D or byte-code based Java?'"
While we're on the topic of C#, rnd() queries: "It's been a while now, since Mono and DotGnu have begun eroding the market power of Microsoft by creating open source implementations of C# and the Common Language Runtime. Over the weekend I loaded Mono and did some informal benchmarking of object creation, intensive message passing, massive iteration, etc., and the results show that Mono is about 90% as fast as Microsoft's implementation after a very short time. I now want to switch my .NET development over to Linux/Mono exclusively, but I want to first settle on a free alternative to Visual Studio .NET 2003. Any suggestions?"
How about Eclipse?
Java SDK v1.5 (not yet released) contains support for 'generics', which are very much like C++ templates for Java:
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http://java.sun.com/features/2003/05/bloch_qa.htm
You apparently haven't taken the time to work with any of the newer releases of java (1.3 and 1.4). Java is a very mature and worthy language, especially when it comes to developing non platform dependent applications. I prefer java since I CAN program it on a Linux box, transfer it to a windows, mac or even a mainframe and the program will still run exactly the same without changing a single line. lets see c, c++, .Net or c# do that...
Also don't forget about a little thing called J2ME which is slowly but surely making it's way onto cell phones and other small devices.
You may want to take another look at todays Java before declaring that it sucks.
-Cnik
Linkers already do this. At this point, it is ubiquitous functionality. The linker has a list of functions that are referenced, and functions that are not referenced. Functions and libraries not referenced are discarded. I know for MSVC, this is done by using /opt:ref which is part of the default RELEASE builds. This all works for OO code like C++ as well since the methods boils down to functions as far as the linker is concerned.
There are some special cases:
1) You mentioned strcat() which can be inlined by many compilers. In this case, you trade speed for code bloat - the library isn't really used at all here. In MSVC this is an "intrinsic" function.
2) Dynamic libraries may be treated differently. It is more difficult to try to partially load them. I'm not sure how Linux handles this. Windows allows for a DLL to contain multiple code and data segments, which can be loaded individually if needed.