C++/CLI : Advantages over C#

Question

Is there any major advantage of managed C++/CLI over C#. Definitely not the syntax I suppose as the following code in C++/CLI is real ugly,

C++/CLI code:

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Answer 1

I can think of 3 main reasons to use C++/CLI:

1. You already have a large C++ project and want to use .NET in it (whether you want to migrate it completely in the future or not)
2. You want to use a library written in C or C++. For simple libraries, you can use C#/PInvoke, but e.g. if the libary comes with a complex type system, you might be better off creating C++/CLI wrappers instead of recreating the type system in C#
3. Parts in your project are best written in C++. E.g. if you're doing speech recognition or image processing, C++ might simply be better suited for the task.

Answer 2

Generally, I think the main advantage of C++/CLI is simply familiarity for C++ developers. If you're not coming from a C++ background then go with C#.

Answer 3

Using C++/CLI it is much easy to interact with native C++ code

Answer 4

Being able to use native headers files directly is a huge advantage, but not the only one.

Stack semantics are so much better than anything C# has to offer for IDisposable management. C++/CLI has one uniform syntax for correctly managing variables which are IDisposable and those which aren't, both as local variables and as member fields. Comparison:

ref class MyClass
{
   FileStream fs;
}

vs

class MyClass : IDisposable
{
  FileStream fs;

  void IDisposable.Dispose() { Dispose(true); }
  ~MyClass() { Dispose(false); }

  public virtual void Dispose(bool disposing) { if (disposing) fs.Dispose(); }
}

Now which language is looking ugly?

Then there are templates, interior_ptr, #define, native DLL exports, pointer-to-member, and probably several other things I've forgotten.

Answer 5

The advantage of managed C++ is that it is easy to mix managed and unmanaged code. But if all (or almost all) of your code will be managed, then C# should definitely be used (and you can still invoking unmanaged code from C# using the DllImport attribute).