OSNews

Bill Shooter of Bul,

"Eh,I've always preferred using arrays rather than numerically named vars. It usually is easier that way."

I don't prefer arrays, but I guess I can see why you would.


My concern would that in many languages the arrays will have an additional performance cost though, requiring more indirection and more calls to alloc/free, and maybe more bounds checking as well. Even with C, the array might conceivably force the compiler to use a specific memory structure when the variable solution might have allowed more register optimizations. Its very hard to predict compiler's optimization behavior these days though.


Edit: How would you formulate a draw line function using arrays?
drawline(single x1, single y1, single x2, single y2);
drawline(single x[2], single y[2]);

// Above is too weird for me, structures would be a bit better.
drawline(coord p1, coord p2)
drawline(coord p[2]);

Edited 2013-02-15 15:11 UTC

Yeah, I'd use structs too. High performance graphics code isn't my specialty so maybe in some scenarios its a bad idea, but I still have a hard time believing that the performance hit outweighs the utility of an organized data structure of some sort. I mean, if its really performance critical, use assembly.