Question

i have following code for allocation two dimensional array

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int **malloc2d(int r,int c){
    int **t=new int*[r];
     for (int i=0;i<r;i++)
         t[i]=new int[c];

      for (int i=0;i<r;i++){
           for (int j=0;j<c;j++){
                t[i][j]=i+j;
           }
      }
     return t;
     }

int main(){
    int m=10;
    int n=10;
    int **a=malloc2d(m,n);
     for (int i=0;i<m;i++){
          for (int j=0;j<n;j++){

              cout<<a[i][j]<< " ";
              cout<< " \n";
          }
          cout<< " \n";
     }


    return 0;


}

it works but my question is: how good is this code according to performance efficienty or according to code speed? thanks

Answer 1

With an int ** you have lots of pointers to tiny (4 byte) memory spaces which is inefficient due to malloc overhead (every malloc implementation has an overhead, the minimum normally is sizeof(void*) AFAIK which in your case would mean there’s at least a 100% overhead for all “cells”).

As an alternative, you could use a one-dimensional array and calculate the indexes yourself like this: index = (row * num_columns) + column. You would lose the nice a[row][column] notation, though. Still, it should be faster to access as well because in your (clean) solution there have to be two pointer dereferences (memory operations) while in the way I suggest you only have one. It would look something like this:

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

inline int a_index(int row, int column, int column_size) {
        return((row * column_size) + column);
}

int *malloc2d(int r,int c) {
        int *t=new int[r * c];
        for (int i=0;i<r;i++){
                for (int j=0;j<c;j++){
                        t[a_index(i,j,c)]=i+j;
                }
        }
        return t;
}


int main(){
        int m=10;
        int n=10;
        int *a=malloc2d(m, n);
        for (int i=0;i<m;i++){
                for (int j=0;j<n;j++){
                        cout<<a[a_index(i,j,n)]<< " ";
                        cout<< " \n";
                }
                cout<< " \n";
        }

        return 0;
}