Thanks for your replies. The article was quite helpful in
clarifying some questions I had.
I decided to benchmark the different append methods (with
["releaseMode", "inline", "noBoundsCheck", "optimize"]) by
appending 10,000 elements to arrays with
~=,
Appender,
with and without first reserving,
with and without assumeSafeAppend
and with a custom array type that preallocated an array and
kept its own length.
The custom array was fastest, then the appender was over 2-3x
slower, and the dynamic array 12-13x slower. What surprised me
though, was that calling reserve didn't actually give much
performance improvement. In fact, of all the ~= benchmarks, plain
dynamic arrays had the best performance, followed by reserved and
assumedSafe, followed by reserved.
For the Appender, reserving was negligibly faster.
I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong but these seem pretty
extreme to me, as the description of reserve gave me the
impression that it was roughly the same thing as the custom array
(i.e. slicing preallocated data).
