Tim Anderson's ITWriting

December 1, 2004

Why C++ makes faster .NET apps

This subject was one of the interesting snippets I got from Craig Symonds, general manager of the Visual Studio product team at Microsoft, in this wide-ranging interview. It's to do with optimization: in essence, the C++ compiler will optimize, while C# and VB leave optimization to the runtime JIT compiler.

Other topics of interest: why Visual Studio 2005 doesn't use open-source projects like Nant and NUnit; whether it's worth building Windows Forms apps when Longhorn is on the way; and the key role of the Microsoft Business Framework in Microsoft's thinking around model-driven development. I also asked Craig about Mono (.NET for Linux) - he replied, "Mono as an implementation of the CLI standard is goodness." Note the qualification!