How noticeable is the difference of performance among TList, TObjectList, and plain array, if it could be estimated?

Question

*Summarization:

Please check the knowledgeable comments from the Delphi experts. Specifically for me, I would try to use old TList/TObjectList as David suggested, and use hard-cast and TObjectList.List property as A.Bouchez suggested. I will try TDynArray when refactoring in future.

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Say that I have a TAtom class as defined in the following code. There are about hundreds up to thousands of TAtom instances at run time, stored in a dynamic array for now. At run time, I need to do simple float math on TAtom.X/Y/Z of all the existing TAtom instances more than 30 times per second.

Now, I need to add the ability of adding, inserting, deleting of TAtom instances at run time. It seems that my choices are (1) request a big array; (2) stick to dynamic array and manually SetLength; (3) switch to regular TList; (4) switch to regular TObjectList.

I want to avoid (1) unless it is necessary, because I then have to change quite a lot function signatures. (2) looks not good either, because TList/TObjectList seems born for this task. However, because type-casting is needed using the regular TList/TObjectList, could some one comment on the possible performance hit? I mean, it would be best if the performance burden could be estimated before I rewrites the code. If the performance will drop noticeably, is there other technics that I could use?

Furthermore, I am wondering if there is performance difference between using TList and TObjectList?

  TAtom = class
  public
    ElementZ: Integer;
    X, Y, Z: Extended;  
    other variables: other types;
  end;

  TAAtom = array of TAtom;

Answer 1

If you use Generics.Collections.TObjectList<TAtom> and there's no need for casting.

Performance should be fine for the usage that you describe. Inserting is more demanding than adding to the end because you need to shift the items after the insertion point up the list.

So long as you avoid SetLength(A, Length(A)+1) and opt for a more sensible allocation strategy dynamic arrays are equivalent to all of the TList like classes.

On occasions I have had problems with performance and memory fragmentation when trying to maintain large lists as contiguous blocks of memory. Then I have resorted to a sub-allocation scheme. But since your lists contain object references which are essentially pointers, you already have implicit sub-allocation.

It's all somewhat speculative and you really need to measure – otherwise we can only guess.