C♭: a new modular approach to implementing efficient and tunable collections

Abstract

Collections are commonly implemented as libraries by data structure experts, and are relied on heavily by application developers. The expert’s task is to implement a wide range of collections, and the application developer’s task is to pick an appropriate collection for each usage scenario. The design space for collections is huge, as data structures in practice implement not only their semantics, but also several performance-related concerns like memory layout and (im)mutability.