Array types

[bearophile]

Nick B:
> Have you got any numbers to back your claim for increased performance 
> for nD rectangular dynamic arrays ?

They often don't give a significant performance increase. They increase a bit cache coherence if you scan them by rows, and they waste a bit less memory, but usually this is not the purpose of their existence.

(If their row length is always a power of two, you can find the item with a shift and sum, this sometimes is a bit faster than using an array of pointers or a product and sum. But this is not a common case, and unfortunately cache associativity decreases the efficiency of this case).

Bye,
bearophile