It’s Faster Because It’s C
I was recently drawn into another discussion about a claim that project Foo was faster than project Bar because Foo is written in C (or maybe C++) and Bar is written in Java. In my experience, as a long-time kernel programmer and as someone who often codes in C even when there are almost certainly better choices, such claims are practically always false. The speed at which a particular piece of code executes only has a significant effect if your program can find something else to do after that piece is done – in other words, if your program is CPU-bound and/or well parallelized. Most programs are neither. The great majority of programs fit into one or more of the following categories.
