priq

Array implementation of the min/max heap.

PriorityQueue is build on top of raw array for efficient performance.

There are two major reasons what makes this PriorityQueue different from other binary heap implementations currently available:

1 - Allows data ordering to scores with PartialOrd. - Every other min-max heap requires total ordering of scores (e.g. should implement Ord trait). This can be an issue, for example, when you want to order items based on a float scores, which doesn't implement Ord trait. - You can read about Rust's implementation or Ord, PartialOrd and what's the different here

2 - Separation of score and item you wish to store. - This frees enforcement for associated items to implement any ordering. - Makes easier to evaluate items' order.

3 - Equal scoring items are stored at first available free space. - This gives performance boost for large number of entries.

4 - Easy to use!

Implementation

You can read more about this crate on my blog

A Min-Max Heap with designated arguments for score and associated item!

A Default implementation is a Min-Heap where the top node (root) is the lowest scoring element:

The value of Parent Node is smaller than Child Node.

Every parent node, including the top (root) node, is less than or equal to the value of its children nodes. And the left child is always less than or equal to the right child.

PriorityQueue allows duplicate score/item values. When you [put]the item with a similar score that’s already in the queue new entry will be stored at the first empty location in memory. This gives an incremental performance boost (instead of resolving by using the associated item as a secondary tool to priority evaluation). Also, this form of implementation doesn’t enforce for the element T to have any implemented ordering. This guarantees that the top node will always be of minimum value.

You can initialize an empty PriorityQueue and later add items:

use priq::priq::PriorityQueue;
                                                                             
let pq: PriorityQueue<usize, String> = PriorityQueue::new();

Or you can heapify a Vec and/or a slice:

use priq::priq::PriorityQueue;
                                                                             
let pq_from_vec = PriorityQueue::from(vec![(5, 55), (1, 11), (4, 44)]);
let pq_from_slice = PriorityQueue::from([(5, 55), (1, 11), (4, 44)]);

The standard usage of this data structure is to [put] an element to the queue and [pop] to remove the top element and peek to check what’s the top element in the queue. The stored structure of the elements is a balanced tree realized using an array with a contiguous memory location. This allows maintaining a proper parent-child relationship between put-ed items.

Runtime complexity with Big-O Notation:

You can also iterate over elements using for loop but the returned slice will not be properly order as the heap is re-balanced after each insertion and deletion. If you want to grab items in a proper priority call [pop] in a loop until it returns None.

What if you want to custom struct without having a separate and specific score? You can pass the struct’s clone as a score and as an associated value, but if in this kind of scenario I’d recommend using [std::collections::binary_heap] as it better fits the purpose.

If instead of Min-Heap you want to have Max-Heap, where the highest-scoring element is on top you can pass score using [std::cmp::Reverse] or a custom [Ord] implementation can be used to have custom prioritization logic.

Example

use std::cmp::Reverse;
use priq::priq::PriorityQueue;
                                                                             
let mut pq: PriorityQueue<Reverse<u8>, String> = PriorityQueue::new();
pq.put(Reverse(26), "Z".to_string());
pq.put(Reverse(1), "A".to_string());
assert_eq!(pq.pop().unwrap().1, "Z");

Performance

This are the benchmark results for priq::PriorityQueue:

How it compares to std::collections::BinaryHeap: