Subj : Re: OO compilers and efficiency
To   : comp.programming
From : Jon Harrop
Date : Sun Jul 24 2005 08:59 pm

Rob Thorpe wrote:
> Yes, that's true, but malloc and free are generally very efficient.

No, either or both of malloc and free are expensive. Which is cheap is not
usually known to the programmer (usually malloc is cheaper). It is this not
knowing that leads to inefficient code with manual allocation and
deallocation via malloc and free. If you want to optimise your code then
you should malloc a big block of memory and write your own customised
memory allocation and deallocation routines.

This is why malloc/new and free/delete are replaced by much faster, custom
"allocators" in the C++ STL.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com

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