In article <0ab81bd1-1e5a-43eb-8a7f-bfc9d0148d5c@
28g2000hsw.googlegroups.com>, szhorvat@gmail.com says...
[ ... ]
1) the newer version of VC++ has reduced I/O speed a lot.
I only have VS 2008 Express, so I don't know, but it seems possible.
If you previously said you were using the "Express" edition, I didn't
catch it.
In any case, that's almost certainly the majority of the explanation
right there. Much of what they do in the Express edition of the compiler
is disable nearly _all_ optimization. Since iostreams are templates,
that means most of the code involved is being compiled with virtually no
optimization applied.
Fortunately, this is fairly easy to fix: the full version of the
compiler is included with (among other things) a number of versions of
the Windows SDK. If you care about performance at all, I'd advise
downloading and using that (at least for final builds).