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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

You could certainly make it harder on yourself by malloc-ing each Shape individually and storing those pointers in a dynamic array. Using a language like C# ... would force that allocation structure.

What's stopping you from using a fixed array of structs in C#, just as the author has done in C?

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Nothing. In C# it's not unusual to use struct arrays in this way.

Probably confusing it with Java, where the only value types are the basic ones (unless you store each individual coord in a different array).

Still you could in Java avoid the (under the hood) memory allocation and garbage collection by reusing the same objects. If you wanted to, of course, it probably takes a bit more effort / caution at the developer's side but may provide some improvements in performance in very specific cases/situations.

The primary concern with this isn't necessarily the extra allocation and GC (though that plays a part too), it's the fact that you're chasing a pointer for every object. That's murder for the cache. MUCH faster to just have the data in-line in hot loops like this.

If Valhala ever lands, you will be able to do as in C#, D,...

Until then, the best way currently, is to make use of Panama to create a C struct like memory layout, and have accessor methods for the low level details.

Trivially solved by C# - you can write an algorithm implementation with the same data structures that would perform the same as in C, C++ or Rust but often with more convenience.

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