Is there a performance degradation / penalty in using pure C library in C++ code?

Question

I saw this link but I\'m not asking for a performance degradation for code using \"extern\". I mean without \"extern\", is there \"context switching\" when using C library i

Answer 1

At a basic level, no, you won't see any type of "switching" performance penalty when calling a C library from C++ code. For example calling from C++ a C method defined in another translation unit should have approximately identical performance to calling the same method implemented in C++ (in the same C-like way) in another translation unit.

This is because common implementations of C and C++ compilers ultimately compile the source down to native code, and calling an extern "C" function is efficiently supported using the same type of call that might occur for a C++ call. The calling conventions are usually based on the platform ABI and are similar in either case.

That basic fact aside, there might still be some performance downsides when calling a C function as opposed to implementing the same function in C++:

• Functions implemented in C and declared extern "C" and called from C++ code usually won't be inlined (since by definition they aren't implemented in a header), which inhibits a whole host of possibly very powerful optimization⁰.
• Most data types used in C++ code¹ can't be directly used by C code, so for example if you have a std::string in your C++ code, you'll need to pick a different type to pass it to C code - char * is common but loses information about the explicit length, which may be slower than a C++ solution. Many types have no direct C equivalent, so you may be stuck with a costly conversion.
• C code uses malloc and free for dynamic memory management, while C++ code generally uses new and delete (and usually prefers to hide those calls behind other classes as much as possible). If you need to allocate memory in one language that will be freed in other other, this may cause a mismatch where you need to call back into the "other" language to do the free, or may unnecessary copies, etc.
• C code often makes heavy use of the C standard library routines, while C++ code usually uses methods from the C++ standard library. Since there is a lot of functional overlap, it is possible that a mix of C and C++ has a larger code footprint than pure C++ code since more C library methods are used².

The concerns above would apply only when contrasting a pure C++ implementation versus a C one, and doesn't really mean there is a performance degradation when calling C: it is really answering the question "Why could writing an application in a mix of C and C++ be slower than pure C++?". Furthermore, the above issues are mostly a concern for very short calls where the above overheads may be significant. If you are calling a lengthy function in C, it is less of a problem. The "data type mismatch" might still bite you, but this can be designed around on the C++ side.

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⁰ Interestingly, link-time optimization actually allows C methods to be inlined in C++ code, which is a little-mentioned benefit of LTO. Of course, this is generally dependent on building the C library yourself from source with the appropriate LTO options.

¹ E.g., pretty much anything other than a standard layout type.

² This is at least partially mitigated by the fact that many C++ standard library calls ultimately delegate to C library routines for the "heavy" lifting, such as how std::copy calls memcpy or memset when possible and how most new implementations ultimately call malloc.