[ODE] RE: ALLOCA

[Ruud van Gaal]

...
> My practical experience with using STL in a commercial game 
> on the PS2 is ... DON'T.  Even with customized allocators, it 
> appeared in our profiles often.

Anything that might do malloc() in a tight important loop is a no-no,
indeed.
I completely agree with Mark. In the very end, you want to do EVERYTHING
yourself, for that cutting edge development feeling. :)

...
> From: "Pierre Terdiman" <pierre.terdiman at novodex.com>
> > > Hmmm...  This compiler is about 6 years old and not very 
> > > well-reputed for it's C++ standard library.
> >
> > Certainly, but it's also one of the most commonly used ones 
> - and the one we
> > use (latest service pack, yes). Anything that doesn't work 
> on VC++ 6 
> > is unlikely to become very popular....

Some time ago I tried VC7 for my app, Racer. It turned out that:
- VC7 was about twice as memory-hungry, making it impossible to run normally
on my laptop.
- The features I used most were harder to find (Project Settings), and had
their shortcut removed or changed (Alt-F7 for example), not adding to the
relative clearnessof VC6
- The game itself run slightly slower.

I don't use .NET and hardly ever STL (which, I've heard, had some important
bugs fixed in VC7). So I dropped VC7 in favour of VC6. Never regretted that.
Oh, and I don't use templates either, nor multiple inheritance. I've written
a compiler, have seen the implications, and it's so easy to do the wrong
thing there. :) It's just not transparent. But I'm an old school programmer
I guess. ;-)

Cheers,
Ruud