Re: Clean code vs. efficiency

From: Stephen Waits (steve_at_waits.net)
Date: 05/12/04 

Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 15:15:53 -0700

Siemel Naran wrote:
> In general, the STL containers are extremely fast, and might be faster than
> your home-grown containers due to specializations, fancy algorithms, etc.

There was a mildly interesting talk at the Game Developers' Conference
this year given by a guy from the Xbox ATG.

ATG is a group that Xbox developers (1st & 3rd party) turn to for
optimization. They've seen LOTS of games and TONS of code in the past
few years.

This speaker mentioned that in *every single case*, the STL (shipping
with Xbox DK's, probably Roguewave?) outperformed the home brew lists,
arrays, maps, trees, etc.

He also mentioned lots of other mostly retarded things they'd found.
Most were unbelievable stupid, but that's OT.

> But also be aware that usage of STL does not automatically mean your code is
> cleaner.

Excellent point.. Though, it probably generally helps. I know most
one-off tools I've written in the past 5 or so years (with STL) look
much cleaner than those I wrote prior to that (without STL).

--Steve

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