Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Efficient coding considered harmful?
Message-ID: <342@auspex.UUCP>
Date: 28 Oct 88 16:20:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: auspex.342
References: <3105@hubcap.UUCP> <34112@XAIT.XEROX.COM> <1700@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <8630@smoke.ARPA> <1704@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <119@twwells.uu
Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 12

>:     o   Use realloc instead of malloc/free pairs. Use calloc instead of
>:         malloc followed by zeroing each member.
>
>Realloc has to copy data, so this should be less efficient than just
>doing another malloc & free.

Err, umm, "realloc" is often used when you have e.g. an array with N
filled-in elements, and you want to add some more elements; in this
case, if you do another "malloc" and "free", you'll have to copy the
entire array *anyway*; some "realloc" implementations may be able to
avoid this if they can tell that the extra data can simply be pasted
onto the end of the existing array.