TreeFlat is the simplest way to build & traverse a pre-order Tree for Rust.

Alpha-relase!

If you build a Tree in pre-order, and display in pre-order, this is the tree for you.

No extra fluff, just a simple & performant one-trick pony.

Note: The tree depends on the build order, so is not possible to re-order the tree (changing parents or levels) in a different order. So, for example, you can't add a branch later to one in the middle (only can add after the end...).

How it works

Instead of creating a Tree of Node pointers, nested enums, or nested Arena-based ids, it just stores the representation of a Tree:

. Users
├── jhon_doe
├   ├── file1.rs
├   ├── file2.rs
├── jane_doe
└────── cat.jpg

... flattened in pre-order on 3 vectors, that store the data, the level & the parent:

This allows for the performance of Rust Vec, on the most common operations (critically: Push items + Iterate), and very efficient iterations of node::Node::parents/node::Node::children/node::Node::siblings, because it just traverses the flat vectors.

The iterators exploit these observations:

• The children are at the right/up of the parent
• The parents are at the left/down of the children
• The siblings are all that share the same level

So this means that in the case of navigating the children of jhon_doe:

. Users					  ⇡ parents
├── jhon_doe			   Index: 1, Level: 1
					           ⇩ children start at 
							jhon_doe + 1,
							level 	 > jhon_doe
├   ├── file1.rs				: Level 2 is child!
├   ├── file2.rs				: Level 2 is child!
├── jane_doe			        : Level 1 is below, stop!
└────── cat.jpg

With this, instead of searching a potentially large array, it jumps directly after the node and iterates as long the nodes are above it!.

Examples

use tree_flat::prelude::*;

let mut tree = Tree::with_capacity("Users", 6);

let mut root = tree.root_mut();

let mut child = root.push("jhon_doe");
child.push("file1.rs");
child.push("file2.rs");

let mut child = root.push("jane_doe");
child.push("cat.jpg");

//The data is backed by vectors and arena-like ids on them:
assert_eq!(
   tree.as_data(),
   ["Users", "jhon_doe", "file1.rs", "file2.rs", "jane_doe", "cat.jpg",]
);
assert_eq!(tree.as_level(), [0, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2,]);
assert_eq!(tree.as_parents(), [0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 4,]);
//Pretty print the tree
println!("{}", tree);

// Iterations is as inserted:
for f in &tree {
  dbg!(f);
}

More info at my blog .

Inspired by the talk:

“High-performance Tree Wrangling, the APL Way” -- Aaron Hsu - APL Wiki

🤝 Contributing

Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome!

Show your support

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📝 License

This project is dual licenced as MIT & APACHE.