You know what -There was a Perl script I had got from CPAN to generate SHA1 checksum of files in a directory, I modified to suite my needs, for the project I was working at, and the script was taking around 21-22 minutes just to generate SHA1 sum of the required files across the system disk (which was most of the files of the disk except a list of certain category of files filtered by it's extension) and later would verify at boot time.

I displayed the same to my boss, the moment I conveyed him that I started out modification of a public domain script from CPAN; he didn't allow me to use the same for a commercial project, although he wanted originally a script kind of thing only; I was made to write a C version of the same again -that too giving me just 48 hrs only, as I had already eaten up much of the scheduled time with my R & D and modifications job with the Perl script (even learning Perl too ).

I somehow managed myself to come out of the soup by really creating a C program from scratch.

The pleasant part was that the job which took 22 minutes (approx) was taking only around 3 seconds.

This took away all the pain I faced in the last 48 hrs while I wrote the C version of the program.

No one expected this much performance improvement (even myself & my boss) but that was it!!!

I really do expect your C++ program, if you really create, will get you to see the same kind of performance improvements.

The porting issues and all with your C++ program would be immaterial if your project has got a build system which create images for different supported platforms.

Please do let us know here, if you chose to create the C/C++ version of the same? And how was the performance improvement?

---------- Post updated at 03:20 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:16 PM ----------

I'd be eager to know your experience too!!!

Happy coding!! :-)

---------- Post updated at 03:31 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:20 PM ----------

That's absolutely true!!

However a CPU intensive program implemented into C/C++ (even with exactly the same algorithm -however bad that might be) runs not just 2x or 3x time faster but much much more than that of a Perl script (of course the bottleneck is on the percentage of I/O wait, in the overall run time, that you have mentioned).