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Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog

Love struck super villain (Neil Patrick Harris) loses to super hero (Nathan Fillion) musical. This just never get’s old. Almost as good as the official Star Wars trailer.

[MATLAB] Do *not* use `obj.empty` to preallocate object array

FYI: You do not need to use `obj.empty` to preallocate an object array.

In fact as soon as you assign a value to any element in the object array it grows the array to that size, which allocates (or reallocates) RAM for the new object array, therefore defeating the point of preallocating space.

From Empty Arrays section of OOP documentation:

“If you make an assignment to a property value, MATLAB calls the SimpleClass constructor to grow the array to the require size:”

Instead if you want to preallocate space for an object array, grow the array once by assigning the last object first. This requires the class to have a no-arg constructor. Each time you grow your array you will reallocate RAM for it, wasting time and space, so do it once with the max expected size of the array. See Initialize Object Arrays and Initializing Arrays of Handle Objects in the OOP documentation.

  >> S(max_size) = MyClass(args)

Another option is to preallocate any other container like a cell array (best IMHO), structure or containers.Map and then fill in the class objects as they are created. An advantage to this is you don’t have to subclass matlab.mixin.Heterogeneous to group different classes together.

  >> S = cell(max_size); args = {1,2,3;4,5,6;7,8,9};
  >> for x = 1:size(args,1), S(x) = MyClass(args{x,:});end

The only time to use an empty object is if you want it as a default for the situation where nothing gets instantiated, and you need the it be an instance of the class. Of course any empty array will do this, IE: '', [] and {} are also empty.

  >> S = MyClass.empty
  >> if blah,S = MyClass(args);end
  >> if isa(S, 'MyClass') && isempty(S),do stuff; end

Another reason might be to clear defaults if the constructor is called recursively, although obj.delete will do the same thing.

I hope this helps someone; it definitely helped me understand the odd nature of MATLAB. This behavior is because everything in MATLAB is an array, even a scalar is a <1x1 double> read the C-API mxArray for external references and mwArray for compiled/deployed MATLAB for more info.

MATLAB = Matrix Laboratory

Class definitions didn’t appear until 2008. Other languages like C++, Java, Python and Ruby are object first. So the empty method is meant to duplicate the ability to be empty similar to other MATLAB datatypes such as double, cell, struct, etc. IMO outside of MATLAB it's a very artificial and somewhat meaningless construct.