Re: Illegal C++

[Nicolas Sceaux]

Erik Sandberg <address@hidden> writes:

> To me, those property lists look like major bottlenecks (though I
> haven't done any real profiling). Especially the grob property alists:
> While I was debugging some time ago, I saw that
> Grob::internal_set_property was called over 1000 times in a trivial
> score.

But what time a call to Grob::internal_set_property takes on an alist
compared to eg a guile hash table?  I don't know of guile's hashtables
and alists, but in Common Lisp, alists are said to be more efficient
that hashtables for small tables[1].  So there are cases where alist is
really a sound choice of table structure. (I don't know how many
properties grobs typically have).

nicolas

[1] 
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-lists-other-uses-for-cons-cells.html#lookup-tables-alists-and-plists