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purescript-sequences

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Various efficient-ish sequence types for PureScript.

The implementations are based on 2-3 finger trees, as described in the paper Finger Trees: A Simple General-Purpose Data Structure, Ralf Hinze and Ross Paterson, Journal of Functional Programming 16:2 (2006) pp 197-217.

Big props also go to taku0 who did most of the initial work on this.

Documentation

Documentation is published on Pursuit. You probably want one of Data.Sequence, Data.Sequence.NonEmpty, or Data.Sequence.Ordered. This package also provides Data.FingerTree, which is the common foundation with which these three types are implemented, and may also be useful for implementing other data structures.

Why not just use Arrays all the time?

JavaScript's Array type is designed for use in an imperative programming environment, where anything can be mutated at any time. This means that reusing them is usually not possible. For example:

var as = [1,2,3]
var bs = as.concat([4,5,6])
bs[0] = 10

as[0] should still be 1 after executing these statements. Therefore, concat has to copy the whole array, and is therefore O(n + m), where n and m are the lengths of the arguments.

However in PureScript, values are immutable. So we may take advantage of this by writing functions that reuse parts of data structures where possible. Sequences are one such structure — in this case, the amortized complexity of concat is reduced to O(log(min(n1, n2))), where n1 and n2 are the lengths of the arguments.

Amortized complexities of other operations:

Native array Sequence
cons/uncons O(n) O(1)
getAt i O(1) O(log(min(i, n-i)))
setAt i O(n) O(log(min(i, n-i)))
splitAt i O(n) O(log(min(i, n-i)))

When to use Seq (and when not to)

Unfortunately the constant factors for this library are not fantastic at the moment — see the following heading for more information. In particular, for small structures (those which have less than 1000 elements), Array tends to outperform Seq. Therefore, I suggest sticking with Array in most cases. If you know that your sequences will be much larger than this, or if you have already diagnosed and identified the Array type as the source of a performance issue, Seq ought to be a good option.

Additionally, if you are using JavaScript libraries via the FFI, and passing Arrays back and forth between PureScript and JavaScript, you might find that it's easier and more efficient to just use Arrays. Generally, JavaScript libraries will not be able to use the Seq type in this library, and so you would have to convert between Seq and Array at the PS/JS boundaries. The conversion in either direction is O(n).

Is it faster?

Not always. As of yet, the PureScript compiler's optimizer is not very sophisticated, particularly with respect to the code generation when using type classes. Because of how this library is written, it suffers from this — even though the asymptotics for Seq are very good, the constant factors are often not so good. For example:

insert-lots append map filter fold apply concatMap traverse sort