[MUD-Dev] Re: [IDEAS] Starting from scratch

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 6 Aug 1998 12:30:27 +1000  
Leach, Brad BA<Leach.Brad.BA at bhp.com.au> wrote:

> Just on the topic of maintainability, has anyone implemented the
> platform-independant server code using a design pattern of the
> "Bridge"?  (Design Patterns, Gof) I prefer to work on a Unix
> platform, but my co-imp likes Win32. The "Bridge" seemes like a nice
> pattern to solve this problem, but at what cost of performance?

I use this pattern very widely -- mostly because because it maps well
to my soft-code (non-C++-like) inheritance model, and then by
infection to the rest of the server.

Performance impact?  There definitely is some, but I have no metrics.
You are essentially talking about adding an extra pointer arithmetic
to every affected access or call.  At the singular level pointer
arithmetic is cheap.  In the great mass they can add up.  What defines
"great mass" as versus an "acceptable mass" is up to you.  Its the
classic trade-off between maintainability and clean design versus
"ultimate performance".  For me its fast enough with my fairly heavily
nested structure (then again my basic approach to such problems is to
throw more hardware at them).

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
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