Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust

By : Claus Matzinger
Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust

By: Claus Matzinger

Overview of this book

Rust has come a long way and is now utilized in several contexts. Its key strengths are its software infrastructure and resource-constrained applications, including desktop applications, servers, and performance-critical applications, not forgetting its importance in systems' programming. This book will be your guide as it takes you through implementing classic data structures and algorithms in Rust, helping you to get up and running as a confident Rust programmer. The book begins with an introduction to Rust data structures and algorithms, while also covering essential language constructs. You will learn how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. You will also learn how to implement sorting and searching algorithms. You will learn how to attain high performance by implementing algorithms to string data types and implement hash structures in algorithm design. The book will examine algorithm analysis, including Brute Force algorithms, Greedy algorithms, Divide and Conquer algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and Backtracking. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

B-Tree

As you have noticed, restricting the number of children to 2 (like the binary trees earlier) yields a tree that only lets the algorithm decide whether to go left or right, and it's easily hardcoded. Additionally, storing only a single key-value pair in a node can be seen as a waste of space—after all, the pointers can be a lot larger than the actual payload!

B-Trees generally store multiple keys and values per node, which can make them more space-efficient (the payload-to-pointer ratio is higher). As a tree, each of these (key-value) pairs has children, which hold the values between the nodes they are located at. Therefore, a B-Tree stores triples of key, value, and child, with an additional child pointer to cover any "other" values. The following diagram shows a simple B-Tree. Note the additional pointer to a node holding smaller keys:

As depicted...