I'm not following how this means what I said doesn't apply?
push is highly unlikely to allocate memory one bit at a time. If it's anything like a C++ vector, or a contiguous array in any other language, it has amortized O(1) push time by allocating geometrically rather than linearly.
We're also dealing in sizes that are definitely large enough to spill over the CPU buffers, especially in the concat case where we allocate new data.
GC is potentially involved, but the allocation and deallocation of memory, in such tight loops, for an optimized VM (I assume it is), is likely also linear time.
There's no reason a memcpy is faster than a loop copying over items one at a time. memcpy is not a CPU construct, it gets compiled to a loop that copies a bit of memory at a time.
I'm not following how this means what I said doesn't apply?
I should clarify: What you said applies to merging multiple arrays, where the input size is the number of arrays being merged. If we're talking strictly about the performance of push vs concat for concatenating one array to another (which the headline sort of implies), then the input size is always one if analyzing in terms of merging multiple arrays.
push is highly unlikely to allocate memory one bit at a time
As you said, it's going to re-allocate similarly to a C++ vector, which for the purpose of runtime analysis we just disregard. I choose not to disregard it since I don't believe runtime analysis tells the whole story here. Or perhaps more appropriately, merging multiple arrays is a specific use of push and concat that doesn't speak to their performance characteristics in a generalized way.
The point is, concat may perform better in scenarios where one is likely to use it, and it would be misleading to advocate always using push instead.
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I'm not following how this means what I said doesn't apply?
push
is highly unlikely to allocate memory one bit at a time. If it's anything like a C++ vector, or a contiguous array in any other language, it has amortized O(1)push
time by allocating geometrically rather than linearly.We're also dealing in sizes that are definitely large enough to spill over the CPU buffers, especially in the concat case where we allocate new data.
GC is potentially involved, but the allocation and deallocation of memory, in such tight loops, for an optimized VM (I assume it is), is likely also linear time.
There's no reason a
memcpy
is faster than a loop copying over items one at a time.memcpy
is not a CPU construct, it gets compiled to a loop that copies a bit of memory at a time.I should clarify: What you said applies to merging multiple arrays, where the input size is the number of arrays being merged. If we're talking strictly about the performance of
push
vsconcat
for concatenating one array to another (which the headline sort of implies), then the input size is always one if analyzing in terms of merging multiple arrays.As you said, it's going to re-allocate similarly to a C++ vector, which for the purpose of runtime analysis we just disregard. I choose not to disregard it since I don't believe runtime analysis tells the whole story here. Or perhaps more appropriately, merging multiple arrays is a specific use of
push
andconcat
that doesn't speak to their performance characteristics in a generalized way.The point is,
concat
may perform better in scenarios where one is likely to use it, and it would be misleading to advocate always usingpush
instead.