Performance

Performance

How much performance hit can you expect from all this fancy stuff? Not much, about 20% is the worst case scenario: if your program spends the large majority of its time doing formatted output, then it will take about 20% longer with iof than without. But you know as well as I that this is rare and more often the bottleneck is with CPU usage, network access, drive access, user input, poor design, etc. Also, the above hit is not really a fair comparison since iof allows you to not worry about several things that you would have to do manually (e.g. restoring the stream format state after an output), which would further decrease the gap. So it is hardly worth worrying about.

For formatted input, the hit is a little more, 40%, but again applies to a program that is doing purely formatted input and nothing else (no complex computations, no web access, etc), a rare situation. And if you were to code manually some of the features (like validity testing and error messages), the gap would quickly shrink.

The conclusion is that in general the performance cost is negligible. But there are always special cases.

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