engleski

Exploring the Access to the Static Array Elements via Indices and via Pointers — the Introductory C++ Case

We revisit the old but formally still undecided debate on the time efficiency of accessing the elements of 1D arrays via indices versus accessing them via pointers. To analyze that, we have programmed benchmarks of minimal complexity in the C++ language and inspected the machine code of their 32-bit compilation in the x86 assembly language. Before the performance study, we have briefly compared a few methods used for the execution time measurements. There is no advantage in the use of pointers over indices except for some benchmarks and array (data) types, while for the others, the exact opposite may be true. The parallel aim was to provide a ground for the possible further analysis and measurements of this kind on different computers and platforms, and different languages.

Static arrays ; pointers ; C/C++ ; accessing the array elements ; time measurement and efficiency

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