Re: vector, but without the overhead of dynamic memory allocation

From:
Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
09 Mar 2011 11:09:35 GMT
Message-ID:
<4d775fef$0$2821$7b1e8fa0@news.nbl.fi>
Goran <goran.pusic@gmail.com> wrote:

Once you've done a sufficiently big vector::reserve, there is no
additional allocation done by the vector. And yet, you say that this
improved things slightly. That is a clear-cut indication that
allocations done by the vector are not a problem (because there aren't
any!).


  That would be incorrect: Of course std::vector is going to make at least
one allocation (eg. when you call reserve()).

  If I understood correctly, the original poster's wrapper around a
static array is probably something like this:

template<typename Value_t, unsigned kCapacity>
class StaticArrayWrapper
{
    Value_t valueArray[kCapacity];

 public:
    // Public member functions similar to the ones in std::vector
};

  Notice that unlike std::vector, the above class makes no memory
allocations at all. This makes a huge difference when you instantiate
it many times. For example:

class A
{
    std::vector<SomeType> data;

 public:
    A() { data.reserve(123); } // Makes an allocation
};

class B
{
    StaticArrayWrapper<SomeType, 123> data; // Makes no allocations
};

std::vector<A> aVector(1000); // Makes 1001 allocations in total
std::vector<B> bVector(1000); // Makes 1 allocation in total

  The difference is very significant.

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