On Sunday, 14 December 2014 at 22:14:55 UTC, Ryan wrote:
I'm writing a Matrix struct that I plan to use for some number
crunching, which will be intensive at times. So I want it to be
fast.
Will I do better by manually managing the memory myself with
malloc and free in the constructors/destructor or just using
plain D arrays?
The manual way I could bypass the GC and bounds checks. I don't
need (or want) any of the fancy appending concatenation and the
potential slowdowns from the heap allocations that comes with
the builtin arrays.
But I have to wonder, if I just don't use those features, will
it be just as fast with the GC (assuming I compile out the
bounds checks with the -release compiler option)?
Right now my strategy is to malloc one large chunk of memory in
the constructor (and postblit) and treat the 2-d matrix as a
1-d array internally. Then just use pointer arithmetic to
access the elements.
I know the best way to know is just to test. But writing both
versions would take a LOT of work, and I'm looking for guidance
about which path will probably be most fruitful.
Thanks,
Just a hint about "a LOT of work":
----------
struct Hop {
version(noGC) // defined with a custom compiler switch
-version=noGC
private T[] arr;
else
std.container.Array!T arr;
}
----------
The GC-free array already exist in the standard library.
