[sslice]

Indeed.. text[0] gets the first character of a string, or if you want, *text, but text[0] is generally easier to read.

[MysteryMeat]

Won't text[0] translate into "address of text + (0 * 1)"? Multiplication is relatively CPU intensive, you will have much better performance with just *text. How big of a difference depends on how often the code runs.

[BAILOPAN]

Believe it or not, the compiler is capable of multiplying 0 times 1 fairly quickly without generating any code.

[sslice]

The compiler is smart enough to figure it out itself, and even if you did test[2] no multiplication is used. The only thing that happens here is addition and dereferencing.

Note: text[2] can be rewritten as *(text + 2)

[MysteryMeat]

Wasn't sure if the compiler would take care of that or not, didn't really want to create the assembly code to find out (not sure how anymore).

[Edit] Didn't even consider the fact that it was a hardcoded value and the compiler would precalculate the offset. I'll shut up now

[PM]

Originally Posted by MysteryMeat Won't text[0] translate into "address of text + (0 * 1)"? Multiplication is relatively CPU intensive, you will have much better performance with just *text. How big of a difference depends on how often the code runs.

It's almost always safe to assume that the compiler will do trivial optimizations like this one (and by the way, multiplication, even floating-point multiplication is pretty cheap on today's processors. On the other hand, float division is/used to be slower, that's why some programmers first compute 1.0/length and then multiply the vector's components with that value when normalizing a vector. note that in most 3D applications, normalizing is a operation which is done VERY often, so people try to optimize even that. how often is a console command invoked?). What the compiler can't do is optimize a bubble sort into a quick sort.
In other words: in my opinion, it is usually good enough to concentrate on a good choice of data structures and efficient algorithms and writing readable code instead of trying to do small-scale stuff like this
The next thing would be trying to avoid pipeline flushes and cache misses.

[sn4k3]

thats exemples giveme conversions errors on compile

[devicenull]

Originally Posted by sn4k3 thats exemples giveme conversions errors on compile

Honestly... if you can't figure out how to get the first item in an array, you probably shouldn't be releasing plugins..

[Keeper]

The problem, I bet is he's starting with a const char*.

[BAILOPAN]

How is that a problem?