The javadoc of libGDX Array class says: A resizable, ordered or unordered array of objects. If unordered, this class avoids a memory copy when removing elements (the last element is moved to the removed element's position).
Is the elements removal improvement the only advantage of this class or there are others?
In other words - if I'm not planning to remove elements from my list at all can I live with ArrayList?
Array is actually not the only "replacement" of standard Java collection classes. There are many more like ObjectSet or IntIntMap. You can find all of them here.
They are mostly optimized to avoid garbage collection as much as possible. They do this in many ways.
One way is the one you already pointed out, by trying to avoid memory copies when possible, for example in case of a removal of an element in an Array.
Furthermore they re-use the iterators. The standard java collections do not do this, which is why there will be a new Iterator being created every time you are iterating over the collection.
Another way is the use of primitives, which avoids the creation of Objects due to autoboxing. IntIntMap for example has int keys and int values. The standard java HashMap<Integer, Integer> cannot deal with primitives which will result in many autoboxed int -> Integer.
You should always try to stick to the libgdx classes whenever you can, especially on mobile devices. On desktop the garbage collector is usually so fast that you won't notice it, but even there it can result in ugly FPS-lags.
Related
I have read the docs, yet the difference between those two is not clear to me (especially since they share lot of the same operators)
It would be also great to see some examples explaining the difference. Is one more "common" than the other?
First, Collection extends Iterable, so it's fair to say, that every Collection instance is also Iterable.
Collection can be viewed at as a materialized, finite set of data. On top of Iterable interface it defines methods and members such as size, last, equals and 'hashCode`.
Iterable means something you can iterate through. On the top of Collections, this includes lazily generated sequences (which are possibly infinite! For example immutable.Repeat is capable of constructing infinite seuqences.). For this reason, size, last, does not make much sense here, equals and hashCode would be really tricky and probably not worth it.
I read quite a lot about the visitor pattern and its supposed advantages. To me however it seems they are not that much advantages when applied in practice:
"Convenient" and "elegant" seems to mean lots and lots of boilerplate code
Therefore, the code is hard to follow. Also 'accept'/'visit' is not very descriptive
Even uglier boilerplate code if your programming language has no method overloading (i.e. Vala)
You cannot in general add new operations to an existing type hierarchy without modification of all classes, since you need new 'accept'/'visit' methods everywhere as soon as you need an operation with different parameters and/or return value (changes to classes all over the place is one thing this design pattern was supposed to avoid!?)
Adding a new type to the type hierarchy requires changes to all visitors. Also, your visitors cannot simply ignore a type - you need to create an empty visit method (boilerplate again)
It all just seems to be an awful lot of work when all you want to do is actually:
// Pseudocode
int SomeOperation(ISomeAbstractThing obj) {
switch (type of obj) {
case Foo: // do Foo-specific stuff here
case Bar: // do Bar-specific stuff here
case Baz: // do Baz-specific stuff here
default: return 0; // do some sensible default if type unknown or if we don't care
}
}
The only real advantage I see (which btw i haven't seen mentioned anywhere): The visitor pattern is probably the fastest method to implement the above code snippet in terms of cpu time (if you don't have a language with double dispatch or efficient type comparison in the fashion of the pseudocode above).
Questions:
So, what advantages of the visitor pattern have I missed?
What alternative concepts/data structures could be used to make the above fictional code sample run equally fast?
For as far as I have seen so far there are two uses / benefits for the visitor design pattern:
Double dispatch
Separate data structures from the operations on them
Double dispatch
Let's say you have a Vehicle class and a VehicleWasher class. The VehicleWasher has a Wash(Vehicle) method:
VehicleWasher
Wash(Vehicle)
Vehicle
Additionally we also have specific vehicles like a car and in the future we'll also have other specific vehicles. For this we have a Car class but also a specific CarWasher class that has an operation specific to washing cars (pseudo code):
CarWasher : VehicleWasher
Wash(Car)
Car : Vehicle
Then consider the following client code to wash a specific vehicle (notice that x and washer are declared using their base type because the instances might be dynamically created based on user input or external configuration values; in this example they are simply created with a new operator though):
Vehicle x = new Car();
VehicleWasher washer = new CarWasher();
washer.Wash(x);
Many languages use single dispatch to call the appropriate function. Single dispatch means that during runtime only a single value is taken into account when determining which method to call. Therefore only the actual type of washer we'll be considered. The actual type of x isn't taken into account. The last line of code will therefore invoke CarWasher.Wash(Vehicle) and NOT CarWasher.Wash(Car).
If you use a language that does not support multiple dispatch and you do need it (I can honoustly say I have never encountered such a situation though) then you can use the visitor design pattern to enable this. For this two things need to be done. First of all add an Accept method to the Vehicle class (the visitee) that accepts a VehicleWasher as a visitor and then call its operation Wash:
Accept(VehicleWasher washer)
washer.Wash(this);
The second thing is to modify the calling code and replace the washer.Wash(x); line with the following:
x.Accept(washer);
Now for the call to the Accept method the actual type of x is considered (and only that of x since we are assuming to be using a single dispatch language). In the implementation of the Accept method the Wash method is called on the washer object (the visitor). For this the actual type of the washer is considered and this will invoke CarWasher.Wash(Car). By combining two single dispatches a double dispatch is implemented.
Now to eleborate on your remark of the terms like Accept and Visit and Visitor being very unspecific. That is absolutely true. But it is for a reason.
Consider the requirement in this example to implement a new class that is able to repair vehicles: a VehicleRepairer. This class can only be used as a visitor in this example if it would inherit from VehicleWasher and have its repair logic inside a Wash method. But that ofcourse doesn't make any sense and would be confusing. So I totally agree that design patterns tend to have very vague and unspecific naming but it does make them applicable to many situations. The more specific your naming is, the more restrictive it can be.
Your switch statement only considers one type which is actually a manual way of single dispatch. Applying the visitor design pattern in the above way will provide double dispatch.
This way you do not necessarily need additional Visit methods when adding additional types to your hierarchy. Ofcourse it does add some complexity as it makes the code less readable. But ofcourse all patterns come at a price.
Ofcourse this pattern cannot always be used. If you expect lots of complex operations with multiple parameters then this will not be a good option.
An alternative is to use a language that does support multiple dispatch. For instance .NET did not support it until version 4.0 which introduced the dynamic keyword. Then in C# you can do the following:
washer.Wash((dynamic)x);
Because x is then converted to a dynamic type its actual type will be considered for the dispatch and so both x and washer will be used to select the correct method so that CarWasher.Wash(Car) will be called (making the code work correctly and staying intuitive).
Separate data structures and operations
The other benefit and requirement is that it can separate the data structures from the operations. This can be an advantage because it allows new visitors to be added that have there own operations while it also allows data structures to be added that 'inherit' these operations. It can however be only applied if this seperation can be done / makes sense. The classes that perform the operations (the visitors) do not know the structure of the data structures nor do they have to know that which makes code more maintainable and reusable. When applied for this reason the visitors have operations for the different elements in the data structures.
Say you have different data structures and they all consist of elements of class Item. The structures can be lists, stacks, trees, queues etc.
You can then implement visitors that in this case will have the following method:
Visit(Item)
The data structures need to accept visitors and then call the Visit method for each Item.
This way you can implement all kinds of visitors and you can still add new data structures as long as they consist of elements of type Item.
For more specific data structures with additional elements (e.g. a Node) you might consider a specific visitor (NodeVisitor) that inherits from your conventional Visitor and have your new data structures accept that visitor (Accept(NodeVisitor)). The new visitors can be used for the new data structures but also for the old data structures due to inheritence and so you do not need to modify your existing 'interface' (the super class in this case).
In my personal opinion, the visitor pattern is only useful if the interface you want implemented is rather static and doesn't change a lot, while you want to give anyone a chance to implement their own functionality.
Note that you can avoid changing everything every time you add a new method by creating a new interface instead of modifying the old one - then you just have to have some logic handling the case when the visitor doesn't implement all the interfaces.
Basically, the benefit is that it allows you to choose the correct method to call at runtime, rather than at compile time - and the available methods are actually extensible.
For more info, have a look at this article - http://rgomes-info.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/a-better-implementation-of-visitor.html
By experience, I would say that "Adding a new type to the type hierarchy requires changes to all visitors" is an advantage. Because it definitely forces you to consider the new type added in ALL places where you did some type-specific stuff. It prevents you from forgetting one....
This is an old question but i would like to answer.
The visitor pattern is useful mostly when you have a composite pattern in place in which you build a tree of objects and such tree arrangement is unpredictable.
Type checking may be one thing that a visitor can do, but say you want to build an expression based on a tree that can vary its form according to a user input or something like that, a visitor would be an effective way for you to validate the tree, or build a complex object according to the items found on the tree.
The visitor may also carry an object that does something on each node it may find on that tree. this visitor may be a composite itself chaining lots of operations on each node, or it can carry a mediator object to mediate operations or dispatch events on each node.
You imagination is the limit of all this. you can filter a collection, build an abstract syntax tree out of an complete tree, parse a string, validate a collection of things, etc.
I have created a class that I've been using as the storage for all listings in my applications. The class allows me to "sign" an object to a listing (which can be created on the fly via the sign() method like so):
manager.sign(myObject, "someList");
This stores the index of the element (using it's unique id) in the newly created or previously created listing "someList" as well as the object in a 2D array. So for example, I might end up with this:
trace(_indexes["someList"][objectId]); // 0 - the object is the first in this list
trace(_instances["someList"]); // [object MyObject]
The class has another two methods:
find(signature:String):Array
This method returns an array via slice() containing all of the elements signed with the given signature.
findFirst(signature:String):Object
This method just returns the first object in a given listing
So to retrieve myObject I can either go:
trace(find("someList")[0]); or trace(findFirst("someList"));
Finally, there is an unsign() function which will remove an object from a given listing. This function basically:
Stores the result of pop() in the specified listing against a variable.
Uses the stored index to quickly replace the specified object with the pop()'d item.
Deletes the stored index for the specified object and updates the index for the pop()'d item.
Through all this, using unsign() will remove an object extremely quickly from a listing of any size.
Now this is all well and good, but I've had some thoughts which are making me consider how good this really is? I mean being able to easily list, remove and access lists of anything I want throughout the application like this is awesome - but is there a catch?
A couple of starting thoughts I have had are:
So far I haven't implemented support for listings that are private and only accessible via a given class.
Memory - this doesn't seem very memory efficient. Then again, neither is creating arrays for everything I want to store individually either. Just seems.. Larger.. Somehow.
Any insights?
I've uploaded the class here in case the above doesn't make much sense: https://projectavian.com/AviManager.as
Your solution seems pretty solid. If you're looking to modify it to be a bit more extensible and handle rights management, you might consider moving all those individually indexed properties to a value object for your AV elements. You could perform operations like "sign" and "unsign" internally in the VOs, or check for access rights. Your management class could monitor the collection of these VOs, pass them around, perform the method calls, and the objects would hold the state in a bit more readable format.
Really, though, this is entering into a coding style discussion. Your method works and it's not particularly inefficient. Just make sure the code is readable, encapsulated, and extensible and you're good.
It seems like there might be a way, but I'm not seeing it. I have, in the past, used the valueOf() and toString() methods on Object to cause custom objects to behave in numbers or strings based on context, but I'd like to do more.
Basically no. Final is final so they cannot be extended. You could make a class which has all the same methods as the Number class, but it still wouldn't BE a Number as far as the compiler is concerned.
To be honest there should never be a reason that you should need to extend from these classes.
As far as proxies go you could consider making a factory class which returns a pre-formatted string/number eg:
var myString:String= StringFactory.asCurrency("50"); // "$50.00"
as already stated by groady, this is not possible ... also not in the scenarios you described ... but the thing is, that at runtime, the type detection mechanism is pretty easy ... lookup the traits object, and check whether it matches a class/subclass, or whether it explicitely implements and interface ... in any other case, you will have errors ... you can use proxies to implement your own array access ... however, they will not be arrays, thus passing them to a function that expects Array, will cause errors ... also, in AS3 you cannot overload operators, so you will really have a hard time ... you could create a class for numeric values, but then manipulating it would require methods as add, subtract etc. ... there is however a related request on jira ... still, this will not solve your problem entirely, because you cannot control the way an object responds to operators ... if you compile in ECMA compatibility mode, you probable will be able to bypass the strict runtime type checks, but on the other hand, you will lose a lot of speed ... the best thing probably really is creating a class that has to be manipulated through methods instead of operators ... not too comfortable, but the best AS3 offers ...
greetz
back2dos
I've recently seen in a couple of different places comments along the lines of, "I learned about recursion in school, but have never used it or felt the need for it since then." (Recursion seems to be a popular example of "book learning" amongst a certain group of programmers.)
Well, it's true that in imperative languages such as Java and Ruby[1], we generally use iteration and avoid recursion, in part because of the risk of stack overflows, and in part because it's the style most programmers in those languages are used to.
Now I know that, strictly speaking, there are no "necessary" uses of recursion in such languages: one can always somehow replace recursion with iteration, no matter how complex things get. By "necessary" here, I'm talking about the following:
Can you think of any particular examples of code in such languages where recursion was so much better than iteration (for reasons of clarity, efficiency, or otherwise) that you used recursion anyway, and converting to iteration would have been a big loss?
Recursively walking trees has been mentioned several times in the answers: what was it exactly about your particular use of it that made recursion better than using a library-defined iterator, had it been available?
[1]: Yes, I know that these are also object-oriented languages. That's not directly relevant to this question, however.
There are no "necessary" uses of recursion. All recursive algorithms can be converted to iterative ones. I seem to recall a stack being necessary, but I can't recall the exact construction off the top of my head.
Practically speaking, if you're not using recursion for the following (even in imperative languages) you're a little mad:
Tree traversal
Graphs
Lexing/Parsing
Sorting
When you are walking any kind of tree structure, for example
parsing a grammar using a recursive-descent parser
walking a DOM tree (e.g. parsed HTML or XML)
also, every toString() method that calls the toString() of the object members can be considered recursive, too. All object serializing algorithms are recursive.
In my work recursion is very rarely used for anything algorithmic. Things like factorials etc are solved much more readably (and efficiently) using simple loops. When it does show up it is usually because you are processing some data that is recursive in nature. For example, the nodes on a tree structure could be processed recursively.
If you were to write a program to walk the nodes of a binary tree for example, you could write a function that processed one node, and called itself to process each of it's children. This would be more effective than trying to maintain all the different states for each child node as you looped through them.
The most well-known example is probably the quicksort algorithm developed by by C.A.R. Hoare.
Another example is traversing a directory tree for finding a file.
In my opinion, recursive algorithms are a natural fit when the data structure is also recursive.
def traverse(node, function):
function(this)
for each childnode in children:
traverse(childnode, function)
I can't see why I'd want to write that iteratively.
It's all about the data you are processing.
I wrote a simple parser to convert a string into a data structure, it's probably the only example in 5 years' work in Java, but I think it was the right way to do it.
The string looked like this:
"{ index = 1, ID = ['A', 'B', 'C'], data = {" +
"count = 112, flags = FLAG_1 | FLAG_2 }}"
The best abstraction for this was a tree, where all leaf nodes are primitive data types, and branches could be arrays or objects. This is the typical recursive problem, a non-recursive solution is possible but much more complex.
Recursion can always be rewritten as iteration with an external stack. However if you're sure that you don't risk very deep recursion that would lead to stackoverflow, recursion is a very convenient thing.
One good example is traversing a directory structure on a known operating system. You usually know how deep it can be (maximum path length is limited) and therefore will not have a stackoverflow. Doing the same via iteration with an external stack is not so convenient.
It was said "anything tree". I may be too cautious, and I know that stacks are big nowadays, but I still won't use recursion on a typical tree. I would, however, do it on a balanced tree.
I have a List of reports. I am using indexers on my class that contains this list. The reports are retrieved by their screen names using the indexers. In the indexer, if the report for that screen name doesn't exist it loads the report and recursively calls itself.
public class ReportDictionary
{
private static List<Report> _reportList = null;
public ReportColumnList this[string screenName]
{
get
{
Report rc = _reportList.Find(delegate(Report obj) { return obj.ReportName == screenName; });
if (rc == null)
{
this.Load(screenName);
return this[screenName]; // Recursive call
}
else
return rc.ReportColumnList.Copy();
}
private set
{
this.Add(screenName, value);
}
}
}
This can be done without recursion using some additional lines of code.