On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 12:57 AM, Thomas Grill gr@grrrr.org wrote:
How about function call overhead? For constructor and destructor no problem of course, but accessor wrappers will be called often, in fact it doubles the number of function calls for external access.
I would not worry about that too much. The potential number-crunching happening in your routines will most probably outweigh that small member calling overhead. If your methods are real lightweight (and they are defined in an included - not a linked - file) you can still rely on a decent compiler to inline them, bashing overhead to zero.
I fail to see how those C wrappers could be inlined. Wouldn't that undo their raison d'être (replacing a C++ call with a C call)? But indeed function call overhead is small when compared to number-crunching, if these calls are done per block and not per sample.
So it could be done like this: write a lib in C++ with C++ API, and additionally provide C wrappers for the API functions. Then it's up to the application programmer to use the C wrappers or call C++ functions directly. That seems convenient, apart from other issues as mentioned by Hans and Mathieu.
Katja