In our C++ course they suggest not to use C++ arrays on new projects anymore. As far as I know Stroustroup himself suggests not to use arrays. But are there significant performance differences?
Using C++ arrays with new
(that is, using dynamic arrays) should be avoided. There is the problem you have to keep track of the size, and you need to delete them manually and do all sort of housekeeping.
Using arrays on the stack is also discouraged because you don't have range checking, and passing the array around will lose any information about its size (array to pointer conversion). You should use boost::array
in that case, which wraps a C++ array in a small class and provides a size
function and iterators to iterate over it.
Now the std::vector vs. native C++ arrays (taken from the internet):
// Comparison of assembly code generated for basic indexing, dereferencing,
// and increment operations on vectors and arrays/pointers.
// Assembly code was generated by gcc 4.1.0 invoked with g++ -O3 -S on a
// x86_64-suse-linux machine.
#include <vector>
struct S
{
int padding;
std::vector<int> v;
int * p;
std::vector<int>::iterator i;
};
int pointer_index (S & s) { return s.p[3]; }
// movq 32(%rdi), %rax
// movl 12(%rax), %eax
// ret
int vector_index (S & s) { return s.v[3]; }
// movq 8(%rdi), %rax
// movl 12(%rax), %eax
// ret
// Conclusion: Indexing a vector is the same damn thing as indexing a pointer.
int pointer_deref (S & s) { return *s.p; }
// movq 32(%rdi), %rax
// movl (%rax), %eax
// ret
int iterator_deref (S & s) { return *s.i; }
// movq 40(%rdi), %rax
// movl (%rax), %eax
// ret
// Conclusion: Dereferencing a vector iterator is the same damn thing
// as dereferencing a pointer.
void pointer_increment (S & s) { ++s.p; }
// addq $4, 32(%rdi)
// ret
void iterator_increment (S & s) { ++s.i; }
// addq $4, 40(%rdi)
// ret
// Conclusion: Incrementing a vector iterator is the same damn thing as
// incrementing a pointer.
Note: If you allocate arrays with new
and allocate non-class objects (like plain int
) or classes without a user defined constructor and you don't want to have your elements initialized initially, using new
-allocated arrays can have performance advantages because std::vector
initializes all elements to default values (0 for int, for example) on construction (credits to @bernie for reminding me).