I read this article: https://medium.com/microsoft-open-source-stories/how-microsoft-rewrote-its-c-compiler-in-c-and-made-it-open-source-4ebed5646f98
Since C# has a built in garbage collector, is Roslyn slower than the previous compiler which was written in C++? Did they perform any benchmarks?
Let me address a question that you didn't explicitly ask but applies to your question.
Question: Is explicit garbage collection faster than implicit garbage collection?
Answer: As you may already know C++/C uses explicit garbage collection which means that free() must be called to deallocate memory allocated on the heap. On the other hand, C# uses implicit garbage collection which means the memory on the heap is deallocated in the background. The key here is implicit garbage collection will deallocate memory when needed at optimal times while explicit will always deallocate each object individually(if done correctly). Implicit garbage collection achieves this by communicating with the OS and by using some other algorithms. In all, in most situations, implicit garbage collection will perform better than explicit due to the above explanation. For more info check out this post.
Answer To Your Question: Because I have not seen any bench marks myself, it is almost impossible to say if one would be faster than the other for sure. There are many other features than garbage collection which would effect the speed of each langauge implementation. To clarify, C# is a bytecode based language that uses the JIT(Just-In-Time) compiler. If I had to choose, I would choose the C++ implementation to be faster due to the JIT optimizations lacking in some cases compared to the C++ compiler. Again, when it comes to how fast these two languages will perform it will depend on the situation. For example, there are some optimizations that JIT can preform that are impossible to do with the C++ compiler.
