Implementing Low-Level Trie: Solving With C++
Check out Ayende's nice walk through of creating a low level trie in C++, but first he offers up a warning of trying to do the same in Rust. Full source code is provided via GitHub.
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Join For FreeThe low-level trie question has been a favorite question of mine for a while. It is simple in concept, but the limitations placed on it make it pretty hard to actually build. Previous posts in this series outlined the approach I had for solving this, but I always got caught up with something and didn’t get around to actually sitting down and resolving this completely.
As part of learning Rust, I decided to go ahead and implement this low-level trie using Rust. I failed, it was just too much babysitting by the compiler and having to fight it. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but I kept having to jump through hoops to get it to it. Eventually, I just called it quits and decided to abandon the attempt to use Rust.
But I still want to do something out of my comfort zone, so I decided to run this exercise using C++. Now, I used to write quite a lot of C++ (along with VB, VBScript, and ASP classic). But that was in the late 90's, and very early 2000's. I heard it through the grapevine that someone kicked the C++ standard committee into high gear and started to actually improve the language.
The result was three evenings spent on building a low-level trie impl in C++, and it was quite a lot of fun. I’ll have another post about the actual details of the implementation, but in this post, I mostly wanted to talk about the experience of getting back to C++. And it is… strange.
On the one hand, because I’m so used to C# and have used C++ before, this is oh so comfortable. Like wearing an old set of gloves that you forgot that you even had.
On the other hand, I'd forgotten quite a lot of details about the language and the libraries, and they changed. My old C++ code would be newing up stuff and fighting to manage memory and very likely leaking like crazy. In this codebase? I don’t have a single new call throughout. And being able to do things like lambdas in C++ feels like magic.
I’ll admit that the codebase is heavily influenced by my Rust work. To start with, I’m using snake_case convention, and I found that I’m using a lot more std::pair that I would expect myself to use.
I would appreciate any code review on this, the core code is about 400 lines or so, and I’m mostly interested to know whatever I managed to write idiomatic modern C++, and if not, how this can be improved.
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