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seriously, there is no one size fits all solution and you cannot really predict who is going to end up using your code later on. or what manner they will use it in.
i've worked on defects created by exponential buffer growth, as you can imagine they can be a lot worse than malloc churn.
Not using exponential growth in buffers / vectors / other contiguously allocated collections is a rookie mistake. It shouldn't be made by anyone who's ever studied algorithm complexity, never mind studied CS at any level. About the only exception is when you have global knowledge about how a buffer is going to be used. But that's rare in modern modular software.
I studied algorithmic complexity and software enfineering. I don't think there was ever a mention of buffers or how to allocate them. I do remember there was a brief mention of dynamically allocated arrays and that the usual way to do those was to double up their space when needed. Anyways, there are tons of programmers working in high level languages and I wouldn't call them rookies for not being C programmers.
Shouldn't that be geometrically?
Not using exponential growth in buffers / vectors / other contiguously allocated collections is a rookie mistake. It shouldn't be made by anyone who's ever studied algorithm complexity, never mind studied CS at any level. About the only exception is when you have global knowledge about how a buffer is going to be used. But that's rare in modern modular software.
Program the robot so that it finds the pebble, optimize for the distance traveled as the function of the initial distance between the robot and the pebble. The robot can tell the direction (say east from west) and measure the distance traveled.
Not using exponential growth in buffers / vectors / other contiguously allocated collections is a rookie mistake. It shouldn't be made by anyone who's ever studied algorithm complexity, never mind studied CS at any level. About the only exception is when you have global knowledge about how a buffer is going to be used. But that's rare in modern modular software.
I studied algorithmic complexity and software enfineering. I don't think there was ever a mention of buffers or how to allocate them. I do remember there was a brief mention of dynamically allocated arrays and that the usual way to do those was to double up their space when needed. Anyways, there are tons of programmers working in high level languages and I wouldn't call them rookies for not being C programmers.
From the comments, the linked SO question is probably better a treat of the title than the article: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1100311/what-is-the-ideal... I would have guessed by now it is common knowledge that you should grow your buffers exponentially. The only question being by how much? For general usage it seems 1.5 is usually used but another factor could be better if you have different constraints for…
haha, cue firefox going back to using ridiculous amounts of memory in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. seriously, there is no one size fits all solution and you cannot really predict who is going to end up using your code later on. or what manner they will use it in. i've worked on defects created by exponential buffer growth, as you can imagine they can be a lot worse than malloc churn.
When you have 512MiB of memory and your current allocation is 256MiB, where do you go?
Also when your dataset allocates 64MiB up front, then chucks two bytes on the end, where do you go?
Know thy data and test test test is the only rule.