Next: 2.3 NSArrays are immutable
Up: 2 NSArray
Previous: 2.1 What is it
In a GNUstep tool or application, you can use pure C arrays as well,
exactly as you do in C. NSArrays have some advantages and
disadvantages over pure C arrays. The first advantage is that the
programmer interface of NSArray is slightly easier, which
makes your code simpler to read, maintain and debug. In particular,
if you use arrays which can be modified (NSMutableArrays),
the GNUstep library shrinks or expands the array automatically for you
as needed when you add or remove objects, without you having to
manually allocate or resize the memory needed for the array. The
second advantage of NSArrays is that they provide facilities
to do things which are not necessarily straightforward to do with pure
C arrays. In the last section of this tutorial we will be learning
about one of this facilities, the ability of saving an array of
strings (and other simple objects) into a plain text file, and
automatically recreating the array by reading the information from the
file. The main disadvantage is that a NSArray is slower than a
pure C array, but you should not overestimate this problem, which
becomes important only when you need really fast code and have to
iterate over really big arrays. In most cases, using a C array or a
NSArray does not make any real difference on the performance;
but of course there are cases in which it does.
Next: 2.3 NSArrays are immutable
Up: 2 NSArray
Previous: 2.1 What is it
2008-01-16