Design question: using malloc?

[Christof Krueger]

Hello,

I'm quite new to C++ and have some base C knowledge. So I know how to
solve a given problem, by I sometimes tend to fall back to C. That is
what I want to avoid in my current project. Therefore I have the
following question:

I maintain a list of objects that are created. There is some information
that is logically related to each instance. I encapulate this in a
struct like this:

struct myListEntry {
myObject entry;
int relatedData;
}

What is the ideal way to implement adding another object to the vector?
(myVector has type vector<myListEn try> in this example)
Should I use malloc to reserve memory for my struct?
Should I do the following?
...
myListEntry newEntry;
newEntry.entry = something;
newEntry.relate dData = something_else;
myVector.push_b ack(newEntry);
...
Or is there another preferred way?

Regards,
Christof Krueger

[Peter van Merkerk]

> > Another thing that 'C' programmers tend to think is that their C code
is

faster than C++. Not only is this, for the most part, a bogus claim, it also leads to coding improperly and incorrectly when you resort to coding in the 'C'-style.

I'me quite new to C and C++ programming both but I've seen more C code
than C++ code _before_ I started to actually program it myself. That is
why I still mix things up.
C code look intuitively faster, because its more complicated (not that
high level) and one think, that c++ programs have more overhead to
handle. But of course you can write a lot of *really* slow code in
low-level C :)
If you know some must-see links covering performance comparison between
C/C++ programs, please let me know.

You might find this one an interesting read:
http://www.objectmentor.com/resource...tillUsingC.pdf

My advise is don't be overly concerned with performance. Though it is a bit
easier to write inefficient code in C++ than in C, well written C++ code
can be just as fast as well written C code. Often there are more important
concerns than performance, like correctness, maintainability and speed of
development. C++ offers a better compromise between efficiency and elegancy
than C code. My exprience is that only a small part of the code is really
relevant for the performance of an application. On modern hardware most
applications will run fast enough without using dirty tricks. Also many
applications are are more limited by I/O performance than CPU performance,
coding tricks to save CPU cycles won't help in this case.

--
Peter van Merkerk
peter.van.merke rk(at)dse.nl