alt Hacker NewsTo be clear we are — in the service of speed — trying to bake data into compiled program output binaries, which is ostensibly faster because code-pages in memory when executed by CPU as instructions already have it?
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The point of the article and of define_static_array is to convert stuff like constexpr std::vector to constexpr std::array.
New (and delete) can be used in constexpr functions, however memory "allocated" like that cannot leave the constexpr "sandbox" so to speak, therefore std::vector cannot be generated at compile-time, but std::array may.
If you are working with fixed-size data like LUTs, just use std::array [1]
[1] Make sure not to use std::to_array when embedding 200KB+ files, as it's a mere constexpr function and not a language construct and will exceed constexpr limits; either specify the size or use a C-style array in this case
No you are baking data into the compiled program so that you can perform compile time operations on that data. These compile time operations are most often used to guard against erroneous runtime behaviors.
If all you want to do is bake data into a compiled program, there is the #embed feature added to C++26.