Hi guys,
This is just a general programming practice question. I am embarking on a major project which entails a lot of number crunching over double precision floating point numbers using a linked tree structure as the basic object. It will probably do more than a trillion iterations over these structures.
My question is, if I'm concerned with speed, should I go for traditional pointer allocation and deallocation? Or are the performance gains negligible compared to using auto pointers?
I've never used them before, and I have occasionally forgotten to deallocate pointers, so if speed doesn't take a critical hit with auto pointers, I thought I might as well go ahead and use auto pointers to avoid memory leaks. If speed does suffer, I'll try to be more careful about my code.