Re: [dev] [RFC] Design of a vim like text editor

From: Maxime Coste <frrrwww_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 20:46:36 +0100

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 09:40:44PM +0200, q_AT_c9x.me wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 07:42:47PM +0100, Maxime Coste wrote:
> > > That doesn???t happen that often to justify overloading. Hint: Avoided
> > > complexity in the system *beforehand*.
> >
> > That goes back to the linked list/array thing, you dont have generics, so you use the
> > easy thing without generics: linked lists, which are almost always a poor choice.
>
> I don't think that is true, static arrays do the job way more often than people want
> to admit, and they are very well supported by C. Also, performance is critical in
> less cases than people like Bjarne Stroustrup want to admit, when it's critical you
> probably don't even want to rely on STL since it is not finely tuned (as Facebook's
> home brewed library shows, for instance).

Yep, static arrays do the trick in many cases, and the STL is not always the best
choice. What I say is that when you need a list that can handle an arbitrary number
of elements, dynamic arrays are the best bet, and you can write a generic one and
reuse it in C++, but to have one in C gets rapidly ugly and people end up prefering
a quick and dirty linked list.

In the end, its just an example to show that the lack of abstraction mechanism of
C can have bad influence on performances, because C programmers like all other do
like convenience.

Cheers,

Maxime Coste.
Received on Wed Sep 17 2014 - 21:46:36 CEST