Comments by "Anony Mousse" (@anon_y_mousse) on "arrays are weird" video.

True, but it'll really boggle you when you try to use _Generic and it matches every array passed to it as a pointer to the given type instead of an array of any dimension. It's just super annoying because it kind of reduces the utility of the functionality. I can't seem to determine if it's a bug in gcc or if that's accurate to the standard, but I don't like it either way.
2
Languages that use 1-based indexing are wasting time and resources because they have to translate certain uses and assumptions about how you're using an array to correctly handle things. The sad part is that it's often interpreted languages that do that, and they need all the speed they can get. As for indexing into an array in weird ways, I often eschew unnecessary parentheses by using brackets in their place, and if that means I wrap the array itself in them then so be it. For instance, say you need to cast the array to a given type to index into it: index[( type * ) block_of_memory];
1
@hovnocuc4551 How much simpler can it be to say the index is the offset to the element you want in the array. When you consider that more time is spent using a program than programming it, you might appreciate not wasting time processing things in weird ways.
1
@sergiitk When you consider that you have to issue a separate instruction to store the index in a register, then decrement it, then either use lea then mov, or just mov, to read from the memory, it adds overhead. You say negligible, okay, but then process a list of a million elements and maybe you'll start to appreciate how much overhead it costs you. If you're curious as to why you wouldn't just use lea then mov, without the other junk, you might be dealing with object sizes that aren't a power of two, or are too large to be handled in that way with lea.
1
@sergiitk So your program is the only one running on the system then? Okay. I tend to deal with older and embedded systems where these kinds of problems compound much more greatly than on your average modern desktop, and if it ran on a server it might be one of a million processes started up where it would also compound. If you want to write crappy code on your personal computer, go for it, but I actually have to think of others. Also, memory can be mapped to a hard drive, so reads and writes to and from memory can be as slow as file I/O because it can be file I/O.
1
@sergiitk The problem is of course when you have data that doesn't fit the cache, as well as when the index also needs to be retrieved from disk. Also, I very much doubt you've ever written a program where nanoseconds counted.
1
Yes, because of the way C does multidimensional arrays. Though, an array of pointers doesn't qualify as a multidimensional array, and in general you shouldn't do it, so don't.
1