Science Memes

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Explain yourselves, comp sci. (mander.xyz)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)

It's a dynamically-sized list of objects of the same type stored contiguously in memory.

dynamically-sized: The size of it can change as needed.

list: It stores multiple things together.

object: A bit of programmer defined data.

of the same type: all the objects in the list are defined the same way

stored contigiously in memory: if you think of memory as a bookshelf then all the objects on the list would be stored right next to each other on the bookshelf rather than spread across the bookshelf.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Dynamically sized but stored contiguously makes the systems performance engineer in me weep. If the lists get big, the kernel is going to do so much churn.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Contiguous storage is very fast in terms of iteration though often offsetting the cost of allocation

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

Modern CPUs are also extremely efficient at dealing with contiguous data structures. Branch prediction and caching get to shine on them.

Avoiding memory access or helping CPU access it all upfront switches physical domain of computation.

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