I find this very interesting, as I am planning on including a section on
performance in my Visual C++ vs Delphi paper (see Jake's Delphi Site at
http://www.xnet.com/~johnjac ) and was planning on doing my own performance
comparisons. For it to be useful I think you are right that such a
comparison should include both the normal types of code that would be
written by programmers in their everyday programming, and the
most-highly-optimized-as-we-can-make-it code. I was planning on starting
such a comparison this coming weekend (for me it will be a 4-day weekend),
for Delphi 5 Pro and Visual C++ 6 Pro. For C++, string testing code should
cover CString, null-terminated character arrays, and the STL string class,
because those are the three most commonly used strings.

If we can agree on code snippets that are fair comparisons across tools,
I'll use those code snippets to run tests on my PC. I wonder if we shouldn't
find out what code the big testing labs use for this stuff. Does anyone know
this?

Does anyone else want to write up the results, or should I do it?

Also, we could get the Visual C++ guys over in the Microsoft forums to
participate too, once the tests are defined. It could even be a contest or
challenge.