SortedContainers

Documentation

SortedContainers is a fast implementation of sorted arrays, sets, and hashes in pure Ruby. It is based on the sortedcontainers Python library by Grant Jenks.

SortedContainers provides three main classes: SortedArray, SortedSet, and SortedHash. Each class is a drop-in replacement for the corresponding Ruby class, but with the added benefit of maintaining the elements in sorted order.

SortedContainers exploits the fact that modern computers are good at shifting arrays in memory. We sacrifice theoretical time complexity for practical performance. In practice, SortedContainers is fast.

Modern computers are good at shifting arrays. For that reason, it's often faster to keep an array sorted than to use the usual tree-based data structures.

For example, if you have the array [1,2,4,5] and want to insert the element 3, you can shift 4, 5 to the right and insert 3 in the correct position. This is a O(n) operation, but in practice it's fast.

You also save memory by not having to store pointers to children nodes, and you benefit from the cache locality of arrays. When you iterate over a sorted array, you are more likely to access elements that are close together in memory.

But we can do better if we have a lot of elements. We can break up the array so fewer elements have to be moved when a new element is inserted. For example, if you have the array [[1,2,4],[5,6,7]] and you want to insert the element 3, you can insert 3 into the first array to get [[1,2,3,4],[5,6,7]] and only the element 4 has to be shifted.

This often outperforms the more common tree-based data structures like red-black trees with O(log n) insertions, deletions, and lookups. We sacrifice theoretical time complexity for practical performance.

The size of the subarrays is a trade-off. You can modify how big you want to subarrays by setting the load_factor. The default is set to DEFAULT_LOAD_FACTOR = 1000. The subarray is split when its size is 2*load_factor. There is no perfect value. The ideal value will depend on your use case and may require some experimentation.

SortedSet and SortedHash are implemented using a SortedArray to keep track of the order, and then also use a standard Set and Hash for quick lookups.

SortedSet is a C extension red-black tree implementation. It is the fastest Ruby implementation of a sorted set that I could find. I used it as a benchmark to compare the performance of SortedContainers.

Every test was run 5 times and the average was taken.

You can see that SortedContainers has comparable performance for add and delete, and much better performance for iteration, initialization, and include.

• MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)
• 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
• Ruby 3.2.2
• SortedContainers 0.1.0
• SortedSet 1.0.3

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'sorted_containers'

And then execute:

bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

gem install sorted_containers

require 'sorted_containers'

# Create a new SortedArray
list = SortedContainers::SortedArray.new

# Add elements to the list
list << 3
list << 1
list << 2

# Access elements by index
puts list[0] # => 1
puts list[1] # => 2
puts list[2] # => 3

# Access elements by index
puts list.first # => 1
puts list.last # => 3

# Remove elements from the list
list.delete(2)

# Iterate over the list
list.each do |element|
  puts element
end

# Create a new SortedSet
set = SortedContainers::SortedSet.new

# Add elements to the set
set << 3
set << 1
set << 2

# Access elements by index
puts set[0] # => 1
puts set[1] # => 2
puts set[2] # => 3

# Access elements by index
puts set.first # => 1
puts set.last # => 3

# Remove elements from the set
set.delete(2)

# Iterate over the set
set.each do |element|
  puts element
end

# Create a new SortedHash
dict = SortedContainers::SortedHash.new

# Add elements to the dict
dict[3] = 'three'
dict[1] = 'one'
dict[2] = 'two'

# Access elements by key
puts dict[1] # => 'one'
puts dict[2] # => 'two'
puts dict[3] # => 'three'

# Access elements by index
puts dict.first # => [1, 'one']
puts dict.last # => [3, 'three']

# Remove elements from the dict
dict.delete(2)

# Iterate over the dict
dict.each do |key, value|
  puts "#{key}: #{value}"
end

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/GarrisonJ/sorted_containers. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the SortedContainers project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.