[S_A_P]

I have heard that you can expect a 10-15% difference in most cases. However, it seems that there are just some arenas that C# wont quite measure up. I'm thinking multimedia applications would not scale well. Mainly because there is no way via Microsoft's .NET implementation to access SSE or other processor intrinsics. I know that mono announced that this a year or two ago, anyone have experience with it?

[profquail]

You're thinking of Mono.Simd. I've toyed with it a bit, and it seemed pretty fast, but I haven't yet had the chance to write something "real-world" with it.

Miguel de Icaza wrote an article with some preliminary benchmarks when they announced the release a few years back: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Nov-03.html