Persistence for the masses: RRB-Vectors in a systems language

Abstract

Relaxed Radix Balanced Trees (RRB-Trees) is one of the latest members in a family of persistent tree based data-structures that combine wide branching factors with simple and relatively flat structures. Like the battle-tested immutable sequences of Clojure and Scala, they have effectively constant lookup and updates, good cache utilization, but also logarithmic concatenation and slicing. Our goal is to bring the benefits of functional data structures to the discipline of systems programming via generic yet efficient immutable vectors supporting transient batch updates. We describe a C++ implementation that can be integrated in the runtime of higher level languages with a C core (Lisps like Guile or Racket, but also Python or Ruby), thus widening the access to these persistent data structures. In this work we propose (1) an Embedding RRB-Tree (ERRB-Tree) data structure that efficiently stores arbitrary unboxed types, (2) a technique for implementing tree operations independent of optimizations for a more compact representation of the tree, (3) a policy-based design to support multiple memory management and reclamation mechanisms (including automatic garbage collection and reference counting), (4) a model of transience based on move-semantics and reference counting, and (5) a definition of transience for confluent meld operations. Combining these techniques a performance comparable to that of mutable arrays can be achieved in many situations, while using the data structure in a functional way.