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I've built a physics engine in C# called Farseer Physics Engine. Believe it or not, but it is acutally faster than the original C++ code it is based on. I did a benchmark on physics engines (based on Box2d) in Java, C# and C++: http://ianqvist.blogspot.com/2010/12/benchmarking-box2d-base...

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so... you rewrote something and it's now faster? i applaud the outcome, but i'm not sure it necessarily implies that the VM is better than other VMs or native...

It is interesting, if only because I've heard a lot of talk from C/C++ developers who believe that by compiling to native code their programs will always be faster than the equivalent C# code running on the .NET CLR. It's nice to have some data points to debunk that theory.

I've always heard that VMs can do JIT optimization that may be hard to get to with native, and for the most part I've never heard of the .NET CLR being any better than any other, except for perhaps the LLVM which is better, for reasons specific to it.

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