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

Circular buffer


A circular buffer is a fixed-size data structure that contains two indices, a head index and a tail index that connects to the beginning of the buffer. When the buffer is full, the head index will loop back to 0. Their main purpose is to accept incoming data until their capacity is full, and then overwrite older elements.

Circular buffers are useful when you need a FIFO data structure. They are similar to the queue data structure, except the tail index wraps to the front of the buffer to form a circular data structure.

Since circular buffers are a fixed size, as they become full the older elements will be overwritten. Because of their fixed size, it is more efficient to use an array data structure internally to store the data instead of a linked list. Generally, once you create a circular buffer, the size will not increase, so the buffer memory size should stay pretty static. An implementation could include the capability to resize the buffer and move the existing elements...