scripting languages vs statically compiled ones

[Steve Holden]

Andrew Durdin wrote:

> On Tue, 02 Nov 2004 17:56:03 -0600, Programmer Dude <chris at sonnack.com> wrote:
> 
>>Concur.  A while back I thought I could speed up a VB app that had
>>a lot of bit-twiddle operations by writting a C-based DLL for it.
>>
>>Turns out it ran slower that way!
>>
>>Having used the VC++ debugger to step through compiled VB code, I
>>can attest to it being compiled down to native.  Ratio is much higher
>>than with, say C or C++... I'd WAG it at about 10:1 or slightly more.
> 
> 
> On the other hand, I had to do base64 decoding of a string in a VB
> app; I got a very significant speed increase by rewriting that portion
> with a C DLL. So YMMV I guess :)

The difference is probably that bit-=twiddling operations require very 
little cmpute per operation, so in those cases the call overhead is 
likely to dominate.

regards
  Steve
-- 
http://www.holdenweb.com
http://pydish.holdenweb.com
Holden Web LLC +1 800 494 3119