QUANTIFYING BEHAVIORAL-DIFFERENCES BETWEEN C AND C++ PROGRAMS

Improving the performance of C programs has been a topic of great inte rest for years. Both hardware technology and compiler optimization res earch has been applied in an effort to make C programs execute faster. In many application domains, the C++ language is replacing C as the p rogramming language of choice. In this paper, we measure the empirical behaviour of a group of significant C and C++ programs and attempt to identify and quantify behavioural differences between them. Our goal is to investigate whether optimization technology that has been succes sful for C programs will also be successful in C++ programs. We furthe rmore identify behavioural characteristics of C++ programs that sugges t optimizations that should be applied in those programs. Our results show that C++ programs exhibit behaviour that is significantly differe nt to that of C programs. These results should be of interest to compi ler writers and architecture designers who are designing systems to ex ecute object-oriented programs.