Re: Perfomance Considerations

From:
Marco Manfredini <ok_nospam_ok@phoyd.net>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:53:06 +0100
Message-ID:
<3568425.rEJsmpAcFn@technoboredom.net>
Alexander Adam wrote:

Hi,

What I am having is this -- I got a string start (type is wchar_t) and
the end of a string to compare. Now I've got around 500 words to
compare to and if matched, I want to get an unique integer for the
word. Currently this is done by filling up a std::map<wstring, int>
with all words and doing an: iterator it = my_map.find(wchar_t* value)
and return it->second if found, otherwise return 0. Now this routine
takes pretty much time and I was wondering whether doing a manual list
of

if (strncmp(...) == 0)
..
else if (strncmp(...) == 0)
..


No, because on average you have to make 250 compares per word, while
std::map does 8 or 9. If some of your search words show up more often
than others then you might sort the compares, but that's not really
helping you.

would be faster / more efficient? I was also thinking about doing
something like

switch (*str)
{
case 'a':
  if (strncmp(...))
}


Yes that's better. I don't want to bother you with further hints on how
to improve this further, or if you should use hash_maps instead. If
(what I guess from your suggestion to strcmp everything) you have a
*fixed* number of words that you would like to recognize, then a very
good bet is a code generator which turns your wordlist into a piece of
code to recognize these words as fast a possible.
I'm quite happy with re2c (http://re2c.org/), which, with its default
settings, basically does the switch-thing, alas to the bitter end. And
it supports wide-characters.

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