On 11/15/2013 9:19 PM, Mikko Ronkainen wrote:
If relevant, doubly-linked might work better? dcollections LinkList, or maybe DList? I'm asking mostly because I'd like the container to avoid memory allocations while in use.
For a particle system, I would avoid lists. A list of particles needs to be iterated every frame. A linked list is going to kill you as the particle count increases. Since the particles will most like not be contiguous in memory, you'll be thrashing your cache to hell and back.
"Caches love linear access" is a quote to remember. When you need to do frequent iteration of a list, your cache will love you if all of the items are in a block of contiguous memory. So it's almost always better to use an array for this sort of thing. Make your particle object a struct and use a dynamic array of particles that you can grow as needed or, if it makes sense, a fixed size static array. The point is that arrays of structs will be lined up one next to the other in memory so that you can make good use of the cache. Of course, the size of your particle object also has a role to play here.
Google for "linked list cache thrashing" or "cache-friendly data structures" or some such for ideas.
