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Showing posts from December, 2009

Purely Functional Collections vs. Mutable Collections

I've been experimenting with some purely functional collections, also known as persistent collections, and began to wonder precisely how much overhead they incur as compared to the standard framework collections on a VM platform such as .NET. My open source Sasa library has long had a persistent stack type , considered a list in functional languages, and I was considering adding some additional persistent collections. I therefore wanted a better understanding of the various costs involved. I had also wanted to test an interesting design alternative to standard class-based collections. One of the consistent nuisances on widely deployed VM platforms is the widespread presence of null values. C#'s extension methods somewhat mitigate this problem since you can call extension methods on null values and properly handle it, but calling instance methods on a null value throws a NullReferenceException. Therefore, you cannot invoke ToString or Equals without first checking for null. Thi