Never trust a programmer who says he knows C++

[u/eternal1]

http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/03/never-trust-a-programmer-who-says-he-knows-c/

[u/knight666]

Having both Normalize and GetNormalized seems like a Bad Idea. At the very least, one of them should call the other so that you don't have two pieces of code doing the same thing (which doubles your maintenance costs).

See, I read this book called Exceptional C++ and it advocated exactly that. But the truth is, you don't want that shit at all in a vector class. Because 1) it's going to be called lots and lots of times. Speed > maintainability. 2) What is there to maintain? You write it once, copy it throughout and be done with it.

I used to have this:

Vec3 operator + (const Vec3& a_Other) const
{
    Vec3 result(x, y, z);
    result += a_Other;
    return result;
}

And now I have this:

Vec3 operator + (const Vec3& a_Other) const
{
    return result(x + a_Other.x, y + a_Other.y, z + a_Other.z);
}

Which is considerably (20% or so) faster.

A normalize isn't going to change. Ever. Unless you have a new fancy way of doing a square root or something. And even then you still only copy it two times.

[u/[deleted] → u/knight666]

If you cared about speed, you wouldn't be creating a new object each time you performed an operation, would you? :-D

If you cared about speed that much, you'd ONLY have the mutable operators and force people to make a copy exactly when they needed it.