Why is my C++ code three times slower than the C equivalent on LeetCode?
Lately I've been seeing the vector<vector<int>> suggestion a lot for doing 2d arrays in C++, and I've been pointing out to people why this really isn't a good idea. It's a handy trick to know when slapping together temporary code, but there's (almost) never any reason to ever use it for real code. The right thing to do is to use a class that wraps a contiguous block of memory.
So my first reaction might be to point to this as a possible source for the disparity. However you're also using int** in the C version, which is generally a sign of the exact same problem as vector<vector<int>>.
So instead I decided to just compare the two solutions.
http://coliru.stacked-crooked.com/a/fa8441cc5baa0391
6468424
6588511
That's the time taken by the 'C version' vs the 'C++ version' in nanoseconds.
My results don't show anything like the disparity you describe. Then it occurred to me to check a common mistake people make when benchmarking
http://coliru.stacked-crooked.com/a/e57d791876b9252b
18386695
42400612
Notice that the -O3 flag from the first example has become -O0, which disables optimization.
Conclusion: you're probably comparing unoptimized executables.
C++ supports building rich abstractions that don't require overhead, but eliminating the the overhead does require certain code transformations that play havoc with the 'debuggability' of code.
That means debug builds avoid those transformations and therefore C++ debug builds are often slower than debug builds of C style code because C style code just doesn't use much abstraction. Seeing a 130% slowdown such as the above is not at all surprising when timing, for example, machine code that uses function calls in place of simple store instructions.
Some code really needs optimizations in order to have reasonable performance even for debugging, so compilers often offer a mode that applies some optimizations which don't cause too much trouble for debuggers. Clang and gcc use -O1 for this, and you can see that even this level of optimization essentially eliminates the gap in this program between C style code and the more C++ style code:
http://coliru.stacked-crooked.com/a/13967ebcfcfa4073
8389992
8196935
Update:
In those later examples optimization shouldn't make a difference, since the C++ is not using any abstraction beyond what the C version is doing. I'm guessing that the explanation for this is that the examples are being compiled with different compilers or with some other different compiler options. Without knowing how the compilation is done I would say it makes no sense to compare these runtime numbers; LeetCode is clearly not producing an apples to apples comparison.