...oops
> The total amount of space needed to represent this collection of strings is O(k n^2).
I haven’t seen O-notation ever represent ram usage, just algorithm complexity. Is this common?
My guess would be because it was implemented in c, where the usual practice if you need a container type other than a fixed size array is to implement it yourself. IME, c code tends to use linked lists for a lot of things that in most other languages would be implemented using a better suited, and more performent, container type from the standard library.
One way that other languages can outperform c, is it is easier to use the right data structure.
I guess a flat array could still be debatable if you're usually inserting near but not at the end, as it'll still need to move all the following elements. But it seems dubious.
Perhaps a simple way to look at it is that it's like a dynamic array, but when the capacity is exceeded, you don't reallocate the array, just just allocate a new (exponentially larger) chunk and keep the old one as-is. Then just link the chunks in a (very short) linked list, or keep a separate small list of chunks (you're never gonna need more than 48, so you can just have a fixed allocation for it), or what have you. The bonus here is that it reduces latency on pushing and has more predictable performance.
In the end I still lost out to another package that did the same function a lot faster. May be interesting to look back to see how they did it.
https://gist.github.com/bssrdf/397900607028bffd0f8d223a7acdc...
My solution avoids that.
Luckily there's a graph screenshot. But the graph it displays is incomprehensible. Without "id_sort_by_name" being on the one bar, I wouldn't even know what I'm looking at.
The lower screenshot is a flame graph. If you haven't encountered one of those before, it's totally reasonable to not know how to read it. But it's a standard and common way to present this sort of data. See https://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html for more information.
1. Does this have to be sorted?
2. Why is it sorted alphabetically instead of naturally?
