Programming

I get way more use out of Doubly Connected Edge Lists (DCEL) than I ever thought I would when I first learned about them in school.

When I want to render simple stuff to the screen, built-in functions like 'circle' or 'line' work. But for any shapes more complicated than that, I often find that it's useful to work with the data in DCEL form.

The CSR (compressed sparse row) format is a very simple but efficient way of storing sparse matrices, meaning matrices with a large amount of zero entries, which should not all occupy memory. It has three arrays: one holds all non-zero entries in order, read row by row, the next array contains the column indices of each non-zero element (and therefore has the same length as the first array), the third array indices into the first array for the first element of each row, so we can tell where a new row starts.

On sparse matrices it has optimal memory efficiency and fast lookups, the main downside is that adding or removing elements from the matrix requires shifting all three arrays, so it is mostly useful for immutable data.

I came up with a kind of clever data type for storing short strings in a fixed size struct so they can be stored on the stack or inline without any allocations.
It's always null-terminated so it can be passed directly as a C-style string, but it also stores the string length without using any additional data (Getting the length would normally have to iterate to find the end).
The trick is to store the number of unused bytes in the last character of the buffer. When the string is full, there are 0 unused bytes and the size byte overlaps the null terminator.
(Only works for strings < 256 chars excluding null byte)

Implementation in C++ here: https://github.com/frustra/strayphotons/blob/master/src/common/common/InlineString.hh

skiplists are interesting data structures. The underlying mechanism is it's a 2-dimensional probabilistic linked list with some associated height 'h' that enables skipping of nodes through key-value pairs. So, compared to a traditional linked list that uses a traversal method to search through all values stored. A skip list starts from the maxLevel/maxheight, determines if "next" points to a key greater than the key provided or a nullptr, and moves down to the level below it if it is. This reduces the time complexity from O(1) with a linked list to O(N) where N Is the maxLevel.

The reason behind why its probabilistic (in this case using a pseudo random number) is because its easier to insert and remove elements, otherwise (if you went with the idealized theoretical form) you would have to reconstruct the entire data structure each and every time you want to add/remove elements.

In my testing when adding 1,000,000 elements to a skiplist it reduced from 6s search with a linked list to less than 1s!

XOR lists are obscure and cursed but cool. And not useful on modern hardware as the CPU can't predict access patterns. They date from a time when every byte of memory counted and CPUs didn't have pipelines.

(In general, all linked lists or trees are terrible for performance on modern CPUs. Prefer vectors or btrees with large fanout factors. There are some niche use cases still for linked lists in for example kernels, but unless you know exactly what you are doing you shouldn't use linked data structures.)

EDIT: Fixed spelling

An ultimately doomed one that existed in Perl for a while was the pseudohash. They were regular integer-indexed arrays that could be accessed as though they were hashes (aka associative arrays / dictionaries). They even made it into the main Perl books at the time as this awesome time saving device. Except they weren't.

I did a quick web search just now and someone did a talk about why they weren't a great idea and they tell it better than I could; Link: https://perl.plover.com/classes/pseudohashes/

The supplied video doesn't have great sound quality, and it might be better to just click through the slides under Outline at the bottom there.

I'm also not sure if this is obscure, but Bloom Filters! It's a structure that you can add elements to then ask it if it has seen the element before with the answer being either "no" or "probably yes". There's a trade-off between confidence of a "probably yes", how many elements you expect to add, and how big the Bloom Filter is, but it's very space and time efficient. And it uses hash functions which always make for a fun time.

How about this variation of linked lists? https://www.data-structures-in-practice.com/intrusive-linked-lists/

Conflict free replicated data types, I don’t know if I’d call them obscure but they’re definitely cool and less often used. They’re for shared state across computers, like in collaborative apps

@protein

Finger Tree!

A persistent, purely functional workhorse. Amortized O(1) access at both ends, O(log n) concatenation/splitting.

It generalizes elegantly to build sequences, priority queues, and more. Powers Haskell's main Data.Sequence. A functional programmer's secret weapon.

IMO, circular buffers with two advancing pointers are an awesome data structure for high performance compute. They're used in virtualized network hardware (see virtio) and minimizing Linux syscalls (see io_uring). Each ring implements a single producer, single consumer queue, so two rings are usually used for bidirectional data transfer.

It's kinda obscure because the need for asynchronous-transfer queues doesn't show up that often unless dealing with hardware or crossing outside of a single CPU. But it's becoming relevant due to coprocessors (ie small ARM CPUs attached to a main CPU) that process offloaded requests and then quickly return the result when ready.

Maybe not that obscure, but Joe Celko’s Nested Set Model gave me exactly what I needed when I learned of it: fast queries on seldom-changing hierarchical database records.

Updates are heavy, but the reads are incredibly light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_set_model

Not necessarily obscure, but I don't think Tries get enough love.

Edit: I can't spell

Merkle trees

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