Fast, memory-efficient immutable collections for Kotlin.
Kotlin makes it quite easy and natural to manipulate immutable data structures. However, the standard library does not provide efficient implementations of immutable collections. kotlinx.collections.immutable provides a set of interfaces that are designed to be implemented by efficient immutable collections, along with a reference implementation. However, in developing the Certora Prover, we found that the reference implementation did not make the right performance tradeoffs for our use cases.
Most collection implementations, including the ones mentioned previously, are optimized primarily for speed of
operations on single elements of the collection, e.g., adding an element to a Set, looking up a single value in a
Map, getting a single List element by index. However, in many use cases the more performance-critical operations are
those that operate over the whole data structure, such computing set unions or intersection of two sets, or merging two
maps.
The Certora Collections library provides Set and Map and List implementations which are optimized primarily for
such operations. Further, we optimize heavily for memory usage over speed of operations on single elements. We also
provide some additional features that we have found useful in the Certora Prover, such as efficient parallel operations.
The Certora Collections library is available on JitPack.
The API builds on the interfaces provided by [kotlinx.collections.immutable]. See The Kotlin Immutable Collections
proposal. We provide some additional
methods beyond the PersistentMap, PersistentSet, and PersistentList interfaces provided by
kotlinx.collections.immutable, in the TreapMap, TreapSet, and TreapList interfaces.
To create instances of these collections, use the functions treapMapOf, treapSetOf, and treapListOf.