I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
If it were almost anything but memory allocation, I would agree wholeheartedly. Allocating memory, however, is literally one of the slowest runtime operations possible in pretty much any language you care to name (coincidentally, this is most of why C++'s std::string is so slow compared to C-style strings, pretty much any call that 'mutates' a string involves allocating memory for a new one).
The exact benefit may not be huge in terms of time, but it's a good habit to just write optimal code in cases like this where it's easy.
I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
There are indeed other things you can do to optimize your code, but eliminating memory allocations (and de-allocations) is one of the easier ones that's consistently a win in most languages. That's one of the other reasons to group your variable declarations at the top of a function aside from making the code easier to read, some runtime environments and compilers will actually be able to further optimize things so that there are fewer allocations that need to be made that way.
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If it were almost anything but memory allocation, I would agree wholeheartedly. Allocating memory, however, is literally one of the slowest runtime operations possible in pretty much any language you care to name (coincidentally, this is most of why C++'s
std::stringis so slow compared to C-style strings, pretty much any call that 'mutates' a string involves allocating memory for a new one).The exact benefit may not be huge in terms of time, but it's a good habit to just write optimal code in cases like this where it's easy.
There are indeed other things you can do to optimize your code, but eliminating memory allocations (and de-allocations) is one of the easier ones that's consistently a win in most languages. That's one of the other reasons to group your variable declarations at the top of a function aside from making the code easier to read, some runtime environments and compilers will actually be able to further optimize things so that there are fewer allocations that need to be made that way.