Handles Are the Better Pointers
Andre Weissflog (via Joe Groff):
The worst case being tens- to hundreds-of-thousands of small C++ objects, each in its own heap allocation, pointing to each other through smart pointers. While such code is quite robust in terms of memory corruption (segfaults and corruption rarely happens, since most attempts are caught by asserts when dereferencing smart pointers), this type of ‘object spiderweb code’ is also dog-slow without obvious starting points for optimization, since the entire code is full of cache misses. Other typical problems are memory fragmentation and ‘fake memory leaks’ because a forgotten smart pointer prevents freeing the underlying memory (I call them ‘fake leaks’ because this type of leaks cannot be caught by memory debugging tools).
[…]
The gist is:
- move all memory management into centralized systems (like rendering, physics, animation, …), with the systems being the sole owner of their memory allocations
- group items of the same type into arrays, and treat the array base pointer as system-private
- when creating an item, only return an ‘index-handle’ to the outside world, not a pointer to the item
- in the index-handles, only use as many bits as needed for the array index, and use the remaining bits for additional memory safety checks
- only convert a handle to a pointer when absolutely needed, and don’t store the pointer anywhere
