Question

I am thinking about developing Winforms application that would use c library to preform all computations. I want to use C# because developing GUI with it is really easy, and C to increase performance. Are there other advantages or any disadvantages of combining those two languages?

Edit: As computations I mean mainly (but not limited to) graph algorithms, like coloring, dijakstra, maximum flow; I expect graphs to be huge, and performance is really crucial.

Answer 1

and C to increase performance

You could write pretty well performing applications using pure managed code. Take for example this very same site. It’s pretty darn fast, don’t you think?

The way I see things is the following: mix those two technologies only if you are really some kind of a performance maniac (someone that tries to solve the scaling problems that Google does for example) or if you have some existing C codebase that you cannot port to .NET immediately and that you have to interoperate with.

In other cases, managed code is safer. If you are sick about performance don’t forget that in many cases the cost of marshaling between managed and unmanaged code will be higher than the performance you would gain from pure unmanaged code. Also the JITter gets smarter and smarter with each version of the framework and maybe one day it will generate almost as efficient code as unmanaged code.

So, yeah, go for managed and leave C to the maniacs 🙂