My hello world c++ program takes about 1.5 seconds to run, is that normal?

October 8, 2022

This is my code:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() 
{
    cout << "Hello, World!";
    return 0;
}

Picture of my screen. Isn’t c++ supposed to be extremely fast? Why is my code taking this long to run? I’m running on Visual Studio Code, Windows 10, 6GB RAM.

>Solution :

To be more specific: What you’re doing actually has three steps:

You move to a specific directory (via the cd command). Then we have code compilation (calling g++). Lastly we have running the actual executable (named test in your picture).

It’s likely that running just the executable would yield a lower time than all three steps you have in the screenshot.

If the executable is still slow, consider trying an optimization flag for g++ as found here: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html. These flags can make compilation slower, but the actual execution faster.

For fun I timed your example code on WSL using the time command:

csm10495@csm10495-desk:/mnt/c/Users/csm10495/Desktop $ time g++ test.cpp -o test

real    0m0.235s
user    0m0.117s
sys     0m0.043s
csm10495@csm10495-desk:/mnt/c/Users/csm10495/Desktop $ time ./test
Hello, World!
real    0m0.005s
user    0m0.002s
sys     0m0.000s

So for me the executable runs in .005s, while the compile took .235s.