Doubly-linked Lists, Queues, and Heaps
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Doubly-linked Lists and Queues
Factor has had doubly-linked lists for years now, but they were not well-documented or polished. Now, they’re documented and have replaced the queues library.
An example of a dlist usage:
IN: scratchpad <dlist> "red" over push-front "blue" over push-front dup pop-back .
"red"
You can add/remove nodes of a dlist with push-front, push-back,
pop-front, pop-back, delete-node, and search with dlist-find,
dlist-contains?.
Finding the length of a dlist is O(1) since it stores the length as
dlist-length, a tuple slot.
Heaps
Heaps have been updated to allow for <min-heap> and <max-heap> data
structures. Adding elements to a heap is achieved with
heap-push ( value key heap -- ), while popping elements is
heap-pop ( heap -- value key ).
Factor’s green threads implementation had been using a hack for the
sleep-queue: each time a new entry was added it would modify a
non-growable array, which would then be sorted by the smallest timeout.
Adding a sequence of sleep continuations would take O(n^2 log n) time!
Running 10000 [ [ 100 sleep ] in-thread ] times should spawn 10000
threads and sleep for 100 ms in each one, and with the old sleep-queue
implementation it takes over a minute on my Macbook. Now it’s just O(n
log n), which takes a second or two.