Comment by tialaramex
19 hours ago
As with the likely/ unlikely branch hint the problem is that programmers are wrong much more often than they expect on both sides. They're too often wrong to think they know the final size - hence Bjarne's caution - but they're also too often wrong that they've got no idea how much capacity they need at all. So hence this API.
You're correct that this isn't a huge optimization. But it more than pulls its weight directly because it's a small boon when you're right and it doesn't have the terrible penalty that Vec::reserve_exact has when inevitably the programmer is sometimes wrong. It's very much about saving pennies, but the growable array type is so widely used that counting pennies makes sense.
I have a lot more thoughts about reservation, but these suffice for specifically the growable array type.
There are many many situations where I know exactly what is the common path and what is the uncommon path. And when I don't know, it's much harder to optimize!
If you're counting pennies, Vec::reserve() (inexact) is hardly what you want, because in the worst case you're wasting a factor of 1.5x or 2x of elements due up-front overallocation. Maybe chunk lists could be better, overhead is bounded by chunk size and all operations are constant-time. No pointer invalidation either. And you can pool those chunks, preventing memory fragmentation and improving memory utilization, since there aren't a million different sized allocations in your process.