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Asked: 2026-05-11T02:47:52+00:00

I’m currently writing a C# application that does a lot of digital signal processing,

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I’m currently writing a C# application that does a lot of digital signal processing, which involves a lot of small fine-tuned memory xfer operations. I wrote these routines using unsafe pointers and they seem to perform much better than I first thought. However, I want the app to be as fast as possible.

Would I get any performance benefit from rewriting these routines in C or C++ or should I stick to unsafe pointers? I’d like to know what unsafe pointers brings to the table in terms of performance, compared to C/C++.

EDIT: I’m not doing anything special inside these routines, just the normal DSP stuff: cache friendly data transfers from one array to the other with a lot of multiplications, additions, bit shiftings etc. in the way. I’d expect the C/C++ routines to look pretty much the same (if not identical) as their C# counterparts.

EDIT: Thanks a lot to everyone for all the clever answers. What I’ve learned is that I won’t get any significant boost in performance just by doing a direct port, unless some sort of SSE optimization takes place. Assuming that all modern C/C++ compilers can take advantage of it I’m looking forward to give it a try. If someone is interested in the results just let me know and I’ll post them somewhere. (May take a while though).

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  1. I’ve actually done pretty much exactly what you’re asking, only in an image processing area. I started off with C# unsafe pointers, then moved into C++/CLI and now I code everything in C++. And in fact, from there I changed from pointers in C++ to SSE processor instructions, so I’ve gone all the way. Haven’t reached assembler yet, although I don’t know if I need to, I saw an article on CodeProject that showed SSE can be as fast as inline assembler, I can find it if you want me to.

    What happened as I went along was my algorithm went from around 1.5-2 frames per second in C# with unsafe pointers, to 40 frames per second now. C# and C++/CLI were definitely slower than C++, even with pointers, I haven’t been able to get above 10 frames per second with those languages. As soon as I switched to C++, I got something like 15-20 frames per second instantly. A few more clever changes and SSE got me up to 40 frames per second. So yes, it is worth going down if you want speed in my experience. There is a clear performance gain.

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