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What are some cool and obscure data structure you know of? (programming.dev)
submitted 3 months ago by protein@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
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[-] dustletter@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 points 3 months ago

Skew binary trees. They're an immutable data structure combining the performance characteristics of lists (O(1) non-amortized push/pop) and b-trees (log(N) lookup and updates)
They use a sequence of complete trees, cleverly arranged using skew binary numbers so that adding an element never causes cascading updates.
In practice they're superseded by relaxed radix balanced trees.

this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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