5 ms·

Damn, it took me years to accept that dropping C-style or C++-style explicit memory management in favor of garbage collection was an overall improvement. And no

Damn, it took me years to accept that dropping C-style or C++-style explicit memory management in favor of garbage collection was an overall improvement. And now we have to reuse and mutate objects instead of creating new ones because of it.

sroussey 3y ago
I can see the need for memory management for a game. There are other things, also graphics related like map points or point clouds. You are more likely to a struct of arrays than an array of structs/objects as well. Very handy in C but also JS. I suppose you can use a sliding window object (or “fly” object) that pretends to be the object when the data is really split across various arrays, just don’t actually loop over them. ;) I bet someone has done a library for something this way and used proxies.
nitwit005 3y ago
The React style forces a lot more object creation and copying then you're probably imagining. If you want to update an array, you generally have to make a new array, and copy over all the data except for your mutation: https://react.dev/learn/updating-arrays-in-state https://react.dev/learn/updating-arrays-in-state If you, for example, hold your voxel level data in a big array, that means copying that data every time the level is modified.
- shmde 3y ago
  "The React style forces a lot more object creation and copying then you're probably imagining." Its not react style its literally the core of how react works(immutablity). To rerender a component you need the new state to point towards a new reference to an object/array (hence the copying data to a new array) because JS compares objects/arrays through reference and not value. Not exactly react's fault but how JS works.
  - nitwit005 3y ago
    I said "react style" because they are not using React in a conventional way: https://github.com/kevzettler/react-regl https://github.com/kevzettler/react-regl

sroussey 3y ago

I can see the need for memory management for a game. There are other things, also graphics related like map points or point clouds. You are more likely to a struct of arrays than an array of structs/objects as well. Very handy in C but also JS. I suppose you can use a sliding window object (or “fly” object) that pretends to be the object when the data is really split across various arrays, just don’t actually loop over them. ;) I bet someone has done a library for something this way and used proxies.

nitwit005 3y ago

The React style forces a lot more object creation and copying then you're probably imagining. If you want to update an array, you generally have to make a new array, and copy over all the data except for your mutation: https://react.dev/learn/updating-arrays-in-state https://react.dev/learn/updating-arrays-in-state If you, for example, hold your voxel level data in a big array, that means copying that data every time the level is modified.

shmde 3y ago
"The React style forces a lot more object creation and copying then you're probably imagining." Its not react style its literally the core of how react works(immutablity). To rerender a component you need the new state to point towards a new reference to an object/array (hence the copying data to a new array) because JS compares objects/arrays through reference and not value. Not exactly react's fault but how JS works.
- nitwit005 3y ago
  I said "react style" because they are not using React in a conventional way: https://github.com/kevzettler/react-regl https://github.com/kevzettler/react-regl