C++ High Performance

Competing languages and performance

In order to understand how C++ achieves its performance compared to other programming languages, we'd like to discuss some fundamental differences between C++ and most other modern programming languages.

For simplicity, this section will focus on comparing C++ to Java, although the comparisons for most parts also apply to other programming language based upon a garbage collector, such as C# and JavaScript.

Firstly, Java compile to bytecode, which is then compiled to machine code while the application is executing, whereas C++ directly compiles the source code to machine code. Although bytecode and just-in-time compilers may theoretically be able to achieve the same (or theoretically, even better) performance ...