'Managed Prototypes'
MSCD has a front-page story on research.microsoft.com. A friend of mine asked me about a quote in the article which could perhaps be misunderstood:
“It is as much as eight times faster than our original managed prototype, and it’s great that customers will have a chance to experience the benefits for themselves.”
The fact that our prototype was managed is orthogonal to the performance gains we've seen in our MSCD CTP. The speed-up is instead the result of algorithmic and architectural improvements that came out of our lengthy design and optimization efforts.
For the record, managed code is awesome. It does run a little slower (5% - 20%) for some things - especially if you're new to it and write your code in a way that makes the system do unneccesary work - for example appending to a string 50 times rather than using StringBuilder. Managed code also runs some things a little faster than C++, which surprised me at first. One thing that I think is incontrovertable: developing in C# and managed code is much, MUCH quicker than doing the same job in C or C++. My experience has been a factor of two or factor of three speed-up in development for the same quality results.
So, please don't misinterpret the quote in the MSCD story: we're patting ourselves on the back for our algorithmic improvement ingenuity, not dissing managed code.
