Book Image

Swift Data Structure and Algorithms

By : Mario Eguiluz Alebicto
Book Image

Swift Data Structure and Algorithms

By: Mario Eguiluz Alebicto

Overview of this book

Apple’s Swift language has expressive features that are familiar to those working with modern functional languages, but also provides backward support for Objective-C and Apple’s legacy frameworks. These features are attracting many new developers to start creating applications for OS X and iOS using Swift. Designing an application to scale while processing large amounts of data or provide fast and efficient searching can be complex, especially running on mobile devices with limited memory and bandwidth. Learning about best practices and knowing how to select the best data structure and algorithm in Swift is crucial to the success of your application and will help ensure your application is a success. That’s what this book will teach you. Starting at the beginning, this book will cover the basic data structures and Swift types, and introduce asymptotic analysis. You’ll learn about the standard library collections and bridging between Swift and Objective-C collections. You will see how to implement advanced data structures, sort algorithms, work with trees, advanced searching methods, use graphs, and performance and algorithm efficiency. You’ll also see how to choose the perfect algorithm for your problem.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Swift Data Structure and Algorithms
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Measuring efficiency and the Big-O notation


Any algorithm is going to have its own running time and space complexity. As we have seen, these two variables are not fixed, and usually they depend on the input data. We have also seen that we can have a high level idea with the best, worst, and average complexities. In order to express them in an easy way, we are going to use asymptotic analysis and the Big-O notation.

Asymptotic analysis

Asymptotic analysis gives us the vocabulary and the common base to measure and compare an algorithm's efficiency and properties. It is widely used among developers to describe the running time and complexity of an algorithm.

Asymptotic analysis helps you to have a high-level picture of how an algorithm behaves in terms of memory and speed depending on the amount of data to process. Look at the following example.

Imagine a very simple algorithm that just prints the numbers of an array one by one:

let array = [1,2,3,4,5] 
for number in array { 
    print...