Re: Need advice re package organization.

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@attbi.com>]

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:

> That appears to accomplish the end result. However, this
> design pays a price in allocating and freeing an additional
> [sub]object.
> 
> For some designs this would be acceptable, but not where
> you have many instances of the object, where the price
> of allocate/free is too heavy.

No, remember the access all.  The values of the actual objects need not 
be on the heap, or could be on the heap but not individually allocated 
For example, I have a package that implements sparse matrices, as linked 
lists of rows and columns. Very messy and the allocation overhead might 
make it useless if the package didn't just grab chunks of heap and 
manage them as 10,000 separate nodes.  This way, creating an array takes 
time proportional to the number of non-zero elements, but much faster 
than allocating each element, and freeing an array takes time 
proportional to the number of non-zero columns.

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