On 01/09/2014 11:04 PM, Peter Alexander wrote:
Trying to write a bit more about D on my blog now. To start, I've
written about a proof-of-concept range-based API for graph search.
http://poita.org/2014/01/09/range-based-graph-search-in-d.html
I'd greatly appreciate any feedback on the design.
I like the general direction.
One issue with the API is that it does not deal with graphs with more
than one edge between two given vertices very well. I think it'd need a
separate edge abstraction. (Formally, a graph is just a pair of sets
(V,E) with two functions from E to V giving you start and end vertex of
an edge.)
A graph search can have more properties than just the sequence of
visited edges, so maybe it is not a range, but just provides a range.
(And maybe also a range of events, usable instead of callbacks, maybe a
DFS tree etc.)
Allocation of memory for visited flags and the like should be
controllable. Maybe the design should even allow using persistent data
structures for storing visited flags, such that the search range can be
used as a value type / forward range.
As we don't yet have
a graph library for D, it would be interesting to discuss APIs in general.
-Peter
Probably it would be worthwhile to explore a design that is similar to
Phobos ranges at some level. I.e. support kinds of graphs with different
capabilities. (Eg. your implicitGraph cannot enumerate all vertices or
edges that are present in the Graph. The least capable graph kind
reasonably supported might not even be able to quickly report all
adjacent edges to a vertex. Some graphs may allow in-place mutation
etc.) Then provide some explicit representations with high capabilities
and helper functions to convert certain representations to (more)
explicit representations. (similar to constructing eg. an array from a
range.) Constructions on graphs would then return implicit representations.
