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Comment by CyberDildonics | Hacker News Reader

What parts of the EASTL are faster than the normal STL? Does it have better maps?

Edit: From a look at the source it definitely at least has some extra map classes for more specialized uses.

One goal of EASTL is to be faster in non-optimized builds compared to other variants. If a game is running too slow to be playable, it can become impossible to debug! This was especially a problem on consoles with no OOE. It achieves this by sacrificing a lot of encapsulation and accepting non-DRY, manually inlined function implementations.

I didn't realise this was a goal, but it's good that it was. C++'s prime faults tend to be spiteful iteration time (common cause: too many templates) and appalling performance in unoptimized builds (common cause: too many function calls, possibly due to overloaded operators and overly-finely-grained code that relies on inlining not to run like shit).

The famous maxim about how much cleverer you have to be to debug code than to write it always applies! No need to make things worse by forcing yourself to debug the optimized build.

I measured the sort to be slightly faster: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/451yje/ea_open...

For the lazy:

std_sort_time: 0.08805380923877237s (11.908354778344838 M keys/s)

eastl_sort_time: 0.07010223707038676s (14.957810817751337 M keys/s)

EA's sort seems to respond better to full program optimisation than std::sort. Platform: vs2012 x64, i7 CPU.

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n227... search for "20 - Performance comparison"

When I first saw that commit, I was all wtf?? wtf?! Thanks for that explanation.

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