It’s a small part, but I wonder.
- It is a simple game that starts with game start → game play → game end. Then, for each play, initialize some string values to specific values.
ex) str1 = "Hello1"; str2 ="Hello2"; In this case, is it better to declare the const class field separately and allocate the value rather than creating and assigning the string immediately? ex) private const strHello = "Hello"; ... str1 = strHello;
- There is the following score code.
scoreText.text = score.ToString("0.00") + 'm'; If the score is increased from 0.0 to 100.0 in 0.1 unit to update the text, will 1000 garbage occur?
- I know that StringBuilder is used to cause less string garbage. But does StringBuilder.Append() be used for even two strings? Or do you have your own criteria(3 or more, 4 or more …) to use StringBuilder.Append()?
To point 1:
No, string literals in your code are “interned”. That means those strings are already constants. If you assign the same string to two variables they actually reference the exact same string.
string str1 = "Hello";
string str2 = "Hello";
In this case str1 and str2 will reference the same string object instance.
To point 2:
First score.ToString("0.00") will allocate a new string with at least 4 character. Then when executing +'m' a new string with at least 5 characters will be allocated. The 4 character string will be immediately up for garbage collection. When the text variable is replaced by a new text the old one is also up for garbage collection. So yes, if you execute that line 1000 times you will allocate two string instances each time, one with at least 4 and one with at least 5 characters.
To point 3:
You can use a StringBuilder (as long as you cache and re-use your stringbuilder). However simply using string.Format might be simpler:
scoreText.text = string.Format("{0:0.00}m", score);
Of course this would still allocate at least a 5 character string each time it’s called. The format string never changes since it’s an interned string literal.
Strings are immutable objects. So without some unsafe-hacks the value of a string can’t be changed once created. That means when you want to change the content of a string you have to allocate a new string. @vexe wrote a garbage-free string wrapper(gstring) which could be used to reduce garbage allocation. However it might be tricky to use, has limited string feature support and most likely is not threadsafe.