Online Programming Tutorials

The language C++ has features which make it attractive for scientific computing: templates for generic programming, operator overloading for expressiveness, and object-orientation for abstraction and code reuse. Despite these features, the scientific computing community has been reluctant to adopt C++, partly due to performance problems. In the early 1990s, C++ programs were much slower than their Fortran counterparts — typical benchmarks showed C++ lagging behind Fortran’s performance by anywhere from 20% to a factor of ten. Users of C++ often rewrote the number crunching parts of their programs in Fortran to get acceptable performance.

Continue