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>What are skiplists good for In practice, I have found out, nothing much. Their appeal comes from being simpler to implement than self-balancing trees, while c
by torginus 6mo ago
>What are skiplists good for
In practice, I have found out, nothing much. Their appeal comes from being simpler to implement than self-balancing trees, while claiming to offer the same performance.
But they completely lack a mechanism for rebalancing, and are incredibly pointer heavy (in this implementation at least), and inserts/deletes can involve an ungodly amount of pointer patching.
While I think there are some append-heavy access patterns where it can come up on top, I have found that the gap between using a BST, a hashtable, or just putting stuff in an array and just sorting it when needed is very small.
- CyberDildonics 6mo agoYou're right, but it's not popular to go against the premise of a post.
- senderista 6mo agoLock-free BSTs or b-trees exist only in research papers, but lock-free skiplists are straightforward to implement.
- zelphirkalt 6mo agoMainly functional paradigm languages disagree with this.