Performance impact: C# vs C++ classes

[Chuck Bowling]

I have a library if C functions that will eventually get wrapped in a class.
The question is, should i wrap them in a C++ wrapper and call the wrapper
from C# or should I wrap the C functions in a C# wrapper? Anybody got any
insight on this? My primary goal is speed. This is an audio application that
can get pretty cpu intensive depending on how the user has it configured...

 

[Scott Allen]

If you just need to make the C functions accesible from .NET, I'd
suggest creating a C# wrapper that PInvokes the functions. If
performance is critical you'll want to make very coarse grained
functions. The overhead of switching from manged code to unmanaged
code can be high - not something you'd want to do inside a tight loop
in perf critical situation.

 

[Guest]

Dear Chuck,

Swig might ease your task : http://www.swig.org/

Regards,
Bart

 

[Chuck Bowling]

Bart, I took a look at SWIG and it looks very interesting. I'll have to look
closer before I can decide if it'll be useful for what I'm doing, but in
either case it looks good. Thanks for the link.

 

[Chuck Bowling]

Thanks for the reply Scott. I'm aware that most of the overhead is in
switching from unmanaged to managed. Mainly I was interested in finding out
if there might be any performance gain in switching to managed in C++
classes as opposed to PInvoke and C#.