The postfix operator can incur a temporary variable to be created by the compiler and thus make code slower.
Reference: http://www.idinews.com/peeves/prefixIncr.html
Also, item #6 from "More Effective C++": http://bin-login.name/ftp/pub/docs/programming_languages/cpp...
Is there an equivalent instruction in assembly for postfix increment/decrement?
Prefix is going to look something like:
inc eax # increment the value
mov eax,ecx # copy the return value to its destination
mov eax,ebx # copy original value
inc eax # increment value
mov ebx,ecx # copy original value to final destination