On Thu, 11 Nov 2021 11:01:32 -0800 Richard Levasseur <richard...@gmail.com> wrote: > > In the end, it was a fun exercise, but in practice a dictionary and > sorted() got me 90% of the way there and sufficed. Optimizing that last 10% > wasn't worth the effort. > > Anyways, I came to two particular, IMHO, conclusions: > 1. Sorted collections are very niche. I *could* have used one, but probably > would have spent as much time fiddling with them as using a dict/sorted().
So the fact that sorted collections did not help for one single use case leads you to conclude that "sorted collections are very niche"? I don't find this very convincing. Unfortunately, PyPI doesn't seem to offer a way to query the reverse dependencies of a package, otherwise we could know how many packages depend on the "sortedcontainers" package. [...] > 2. If you're in a niche use case, especially for performance, then > abstractions aren't really helpful. Using e.g. a BTree and knowing the > particulars of the implementation are going to be more helpful than having > an abstract SortedList and working out how to use its special APIs for > particular actions. You don't have "an abstract SortedList", you have a concrete SortedList with a well-defined implementation with stable performance characteristics. So, again, this seems to be a red herring. > This basically echos Christopher Baker's sentiment of "whats the use case" > and "why doesn't a sorted() call at the end suffice" to some extent. The use case is obviously when you have to *maintain* sorting at all times. Yes, there are such situations. Some rather high-profile Python packages, such as dask/distributed, rely on this for rather elaborate algorithmic work (dask/distributed is a distributed task scheduler, you may also think of it as a replacement for Spark). I won't go over your performance considerations, but I'll just mention that the "sortedcontainers" documentation has not one but *several* sections exploring performance characteristics in several dimensions. It is extremely rare for Python packages to provide such a detailed insight on the matter (even the built-in `dict` is much less thoroughly characterised). http://www.grantjenks.com/docs/sortedcontainers/#user-guide Regards Antoine. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/EHZGBXSIXZE6ZDBGJPESDQQG4PCNOMLW/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
