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Implementing and Improving Skiplists


An explanation of the most well-known probablistic data structure and some performance numbers for different implementations

Luckily the world of computer science has a data structure that is far easier to implement and has similar properties: the skiplist. To build a skiplist you first descend the structure as you do for a lookup to find the node on the bottom level that should be before the new value. The code here feels pretty simple but, after reading Data-Oriented Design, I'm suspicious that it is not very cache friendly: whenever we want to go right or down we need to chase a pointer.

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Skiplists

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Improving