Is passing an array reference more taxing the bigger the array is?

llHate

I started using Resources for my inventory and the amount of information they are holding is growing rapidly.

For my inventory I use functions that pass as an argument the inventory array taking effect . As I understand these are not the "real" arrays stored in the Actor node but references so they are less taxing and I was wondering If this would slow down the process since I have chains of 4 functions that pass this reference around all the time and the resources are growing bigger.

TwistedTwigleg

Based on my limited understanding of how array passing works in Godot, I do not think there would be an increased performance cost linked to the size of the array. Since arrays are passed by reference, it is basically a pointer that gets passed around, which should be a consistent size as it just points to a place in memory. Because of this, I believe the size of the array should not make a impact (or at least not a noticeable one) on performance.

That said, performing any operations on the array will have a performance impact depending on the operation and the size of the array, so while passing the array itself may not have a notable performance impact, the other code in the 4 functions may. (Though, "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and all that :smile: )

llHate

@TwistedTwigleg said:

(Though, "premature optimization is the root of all evil" and all that :smile: )

I know, but since I'm learning not just gdscript but how to program all by myself (and the internet) I feel like if I let it slide I'll get used to hard to correct practices. Even if I don't need to perform the optimization right now but I want to make an informed decision this will affect my future decisions too after all.

The operations are pretty simple not even the arrays are that big I think we are talking 20 indexes and every resource have 6 variables I'm thinking I may remove some variables I was storing the crafting recipes inside the resource which are arrays of dictionaries because items can have multiple recipes but this may be unnecessary information and I may have a separated Crafting Database or something that stores this information and only gets read when needed.