Fast Dynamic Arrays

Abstract

We present a highly optimized implementation of tiered vectors, a data structure for maintaining a sequence of n elements supporting access in time O(1) and insertion and deletion in time O(n) for > 0 while using o(n) extra space. We consider several different implementation optimizations in C++ and compare their performance to that of vector and set from the standard library on sequences with up to 108 elements. Our fastest implementation uses much less space than set while providing speedups of 40× for access operations compared to set and speedups of 10.000× compared to vector for insertion and deletion operations while being competitive with both data structures for all other operations