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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

How does c++ manage to win here? I'm not doubting, just curious

The classic example is quicksort. qsort takes a function pointer, but std::sort is a template. This means that the machinery can be inlined more often in C++ than C.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18002087/qsort-vs-stdsor...

C++ can inline the comparison function (which is often just a few instructions) at compile time. It can also statically optimize for the stride, using shifts or addressing modes instead of multiplies. C can't do either with qsort, which takes the stride and comparison function pointer as arguments.

Unless comparison function is small and can be inlined, which would trigger the same stride shift optimizations.

In he case of std::sort the C++ compiler can inline the comparison function when it generates the actual sort implementation from the std::sort template. In C the qsort implementation is fixed and must call the comparison via an indirect reference.

Technically libc couldhave an inline version of qsort in the header or the linker (even the dynamic linker) could do LTO, but bechmarks are done on actual implementations not the mythical sufficiently good compiler.

Don't use a libc qsort then. The compiler could generated it (but they don't even generate optimized memcmp yet).

Or the CTL is a header only STL for C, which inlines the sort function and the comparator. And because of the C++ bloat and indirect calls the C version is faster.

Inlining with macros == constexpr with templates.

You can decide which syntax you prefer.

The constexpr specifier should give C++ an advantage

Probably not, the compiler doesn't need permission to constant fold of its own accord if it doesn't launch any missiles.

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