orx-fixed-vec

An efficient constant access time vector with fixed capacity and pinned elements.

A. Motivation

There are various situations where pinned elements are critical.

• It is critical in enabling efficient, convenient and safe self-referential collections with thin references, see SelfRefCol for details, and its special cases such as LinkedList.
• It is important for concurrent programs as it eliminates safety concerns related with elements implicitly carried to different memory locations. This helps reducing and dealing with the complexity of concurrency, and leads to efficient concurrent data structures. See ConcurrentIter, ConcurrentBag or ConcurrentOrderedBag for such concurrent data structures which are conveniently built on the pinned element guarantees of pinned vectors.
• It is essential in allowing an immutable push vector; i.e., ImpVec. This is a very useful operation when the desired collection is a bag or a container of things, rather than having a collective meaning. In such cases, ImpVec allows avoiding certain borrow checker complexities, heap allocations and wide pointers such as Box or Rc or etc.

B. Comparison with SplitVec

SplitVec is another PinnedVec implementation aiming the same goal but with different features. You may see the comparison in the table below.

After the performance optimizations on the SplitVec, it is now comparable to std::vec::Vec in terms of performance. This might make SplitVec a dominating choice over FixedVec.

C. Examples

C.1. Usage similar to std::vec::Vec

Most common std::vec::Vec operations are available in FixedVec with the same signature.

use orx_fixed_vec::prelude::*;

// capacity is not optional
let mut vec = FixedVec::new(4);

assert_eq!(4, vec.capacity());

vec.push(0);
assert!(!vec.is_full());
assert_eq!(3, vec.room());

vec.extend_from_slice(&[1, 2, 3]);
assert_eq!(vec, &[0, 1, 2, 3]);
assert!(vec.is_full());

// vec.push(42); // push would've panicked when vec.is_full()

vec[0] = 10;
assert_eq!(10, vec[0]);

vec.remove(0);
vec.insert(0, 0);

assert_eq!(6, vec.iter().sum());

assert_eq!(vec.clone(), vec);

let std_vec: Vec<_> = vec.into();
assert_eq!(&std_vec, &[0, 1, 2, 3]);

C.2. Pinned Elements

Unless elements are removed from the vector, the memory location of an element already pushed to the SplitVec never changes unless explicitly changed.

use orx_fixed_vec::prelude::*;

let mut vec = FixedVec::new(100);

// push the first element
vec.push(42usize);
assert_eq!(vec, &[42]);

// let's get a pointer to the first element
let addr42 = &vec[0] as *const usize;

// let's push 99 new elements
for i in 1..100 {
    vec.push(i);
}

for i in 0..100 {
    assert_eq!(if i == 0 { 42 } else { i }, vec[i]);
}

// the memory location of the first element remains intact
assert_eq!(addr42, &vec[0] as *const usize);

// we can safely dereference it and read the correct value
// dereferencing is still unsafe for FixedVec,
// but the underlying guarantee will be used by wrappers such as ImpVec or SelfRefCol
assert_eq!(unsafe { *addr42 }, 42);

// the next push when `vec.is_full()` panics!
// vec.push(0);

D. Benchmarks

Since FixedVec is just a wrapper around the std::vec::Vec with additional pinned element guarantee; it is expected to have equivalent performance. This is tested and confirmed by benchmarks that can be found at the at benches folder.

License

This library is licensed under MIT license. See LICENSE for details.