Comment by moonchild
10 months ago
You can add bounds checks to c, but that costs a hell of a lot more than 1-2%. C++ has them off by default for std::vector because c++ is designed by and for the utterly insane. Other than that, I can't off the top of my head think of a language that doesn't have them.
The bounds safety C compiler extension research by Apple has measured the runtime impact of adding bounds checking to C and it is not a lot more than 1-2% in almost all cases. Even in microbenchmarks its often around 5%. The impact on media encoding and decoding was around 1-2% and the overall power use on the device did not change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK9bfrsMdAM https://llvm.org/devmtg/2023-05/slides/TechnicalTalks-May11/...
It's a myth that bounds checking has extraordinary performance costs and cannot be enabled without slowing everything to a halt. Maybe this was the case 10 years ago or 20 years ago or something, but not today.
> C++ has them off by default for std::vector because c++ is designed by and for the utterly insane.
And for those who value performance and don't want to pay the cost of "a lot more than 1-2%" ;p
The data I've seen for turning on bounds checks in std::vector shows overhead considerably lower than 1-2%.
std::vector falls into the category of things that are easy to bounds check, st the cost, even under today's primitive compilers, is low. It's direct pointer accesses—which are common in c but not in c++ or most other languages—that are hard to and therefore cost more to bounds check.
That's assuming you're keeping no metadata about your C array(s) that you're bounds-checking, which would be very slow indeed. :o You'd be traversing pointers until you hit a tombstone value or something. But would anyone do this in performance-chasing code? Cuz, otherwise, with metadata to support your bounds checks, you're doing the same thing that I assume std::vector is doing: asking your array metadata about whether something's in bounds. And that's extra cycles, which can add up depending on what you're doing!
Btw, in my experience, std::vector is fast. Insanely fast. "I don't understand how it can be so fast", "barely distinguishable from raw arrays in C" fast. Not doing bounds checking is probably part of that, though far from the whole story.
std::regexp, std::map, fronzen ABI.... apparently the value for performance is relative at WG21.