Following up on a previous post about the relative performance of STL vs gnulib, this post extends and completes the analysis to include the stl::vector and stl::deque containers. These containers provide a more direct comparison against the Gnulib array-list and carray-list implementations. The results are shown below. Please refer to the previous post on this subject for details on how the results were collected including source code.

DISCLAIMER: Please note that the intent of the post is not to suggest that gnulib should be used instead of STL in C++ programs, but rather to point out that although not part of the C language specification, gnulib offers C programmers a set of containers whose performance is comparable to the STL container performance available to C++ programmers.

Search (unsorted) Performance

Note that the vertical axis represents seconds and the lower the bar for each algorithm, the better.

Based on the above results, it can be seen that the performance of the stl::list is comparable to the gnulib linked_list for both insertions (at the end) and unsorted searching. Gnulib array_list is comparable in implementation to the stl::vector but proves to be almost 2x faster for insertions and ~1.5x slower for searching for this test. The stl::deque is also comparable to the gnulib array_list and proves to be slightly faster for insertions and just under 3x slower for searching.

As a final note, this analysis only performed comparisons based on two tests – push back and unsorted find. This is just an indication of performance and far from complete. The results may well be different if different tests were chosen.

Tags: C++, STL