[im3w1l]

So one thing I thought of when reading this is that very often it is known ahead of time (at runtime or even compile-time) how many push_backs will be done. The programmer could make a reserve call but doesn't bother since the efficiency gain is minimal.

The gain is minimal for doing this optimization at one location. But doing it everywhere, that could matter. Pushing back in a loop could maybe be optimized to a single allocation and a memcopy.

[tialaramex]

In C++ programmers are often taught not to use their reservation API for this purpose because it's designed in such a way that if you don't have perfect foresight you can destroy amortization and thus get much worse performance.

For example Bjarne Stroustrup suggests you should use reservation for "avoiding invalidation of iterators" instead.

[im3w1l]

Sorry I completely messed up in communicating my point: That it would be nice if the compiler would do it for us automatically in the many simple cases. That's what I tried to say, but didn't say, when I said it could matter fixing it everywhere.

[oneshtein]

API should have reserve_at_least(n) and reserve_exactly(n), instead of one reserve(n), which works as reserve_exactly(n), but described as reserve_at_least(n).

[tialaramex]

I agree that this is the better design. Rust calls these Vec::reserve and Vec::reserve_exact

Zig calls the analagous methods ensureTotalCapacity and ensureTotalCapacityPrecise

It's worth mentioning that talk of "exact" and "precise" may be misleading because it probably makes sense to (and despite that word exact Vec does explicitly say it might) discern that the actual allocation was big enough for slightly more items and increase the capacity accordingly.

Right now, many (most?) allocators if asked for enough room to store 7 Doodads, each 7 bytes in length with one byte alignment (thus total 49 bytes), may give you 64 bytes because it was easier, but can't or won't tell you about that. Rust's GlobalAlloc can't do better, nor can C's malloc family. But Rust's (unstable) Allocator trait and many modern malloc-descendents can tell you hey, here are 64 bytes instead. With that fixed your growable array type should consider this, after all instead of 7 Doodads, 64 bytes is enough for 9 Doodads, so it's free capacity.

[dzaima]

Note that glibc does provide a malloc_usable_size to query the size of a malloc'd block; not standard though of course.

A problem with just directly exposing such is it makes precise sanitizing impossible, as you'd have to tolerate some out-of-intended-bounds reads/writes. (and making the sanitizer always give exact-size allocations would also be bad as that'd end up not testing code paths that may break when they're not)