Re: Need advice re package organization.

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Robert I. Eachus wrote:
> 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.

And that is fine if you are instantiating all of those objects in
one fell swoop, or managing a pool of such. But _all_ of these
are "work-arounds" to the original problem. All of these work
arounds take you away from the original problem at hand. Others
will also argue that other environments do not require these
work-arounds, either.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg