bounded-set

Implements BoundedSet, a reimplementation of Set specialised for storing integers bounded by a maximum value.

Why?

Let's say you want to keep track of some numbers, and efficiently answer questions like "have I seen this number?". You could use:

• an array--but then lookups are linear time
• an Object--lookups are now constant time, but it's not super-fast, and the keys have to be strings
• or a native Set (best).

If you know the maximum possible number up front, you can use bounded-set. BoundedSet works like JavaScript's native Set, except it's a few times faster. If you need a high-performance data structure, use this!

Usage

The API is similar to the Set class, except you must give the bound as the first argument:

const BoundedSet = require('bounded-set')
let s = new BoundedSet(1000)
s.add(42)
s.has(42) // true

Accessing an integer over the bound is not allowed.

b.has(1001) // Error: out of bounds: 1001
b.has(-1)   // Error: out of bounds: -1

The bound is inclusive.

Performance

BoundedSet is more than twice as fast as a native Set.

• Inserts and deletes are about ~3x faster than a native Set.
• Lookups are about ~2-3 faster than a native Set.
• Iteration is 25% faster than a native Set (depending on bound); half the speed of about twice as fast as array iteration using forEach; and 20x faster than using Object.keys()... :-)

It used to be a bit faster still, but Sets have caught up... the V8 team do good stuff :-)

Full API

Supports IE10+. (JS Set supports IE11+.)

The following subset of the Set API is supported:

• add(item)
• delete(item)
• has(item) -> Boolean
• values() -> Array of values, instead of the native SetIterator
• size -> Number

Not supported:

• Iterators (feel free to send a PR!)

Downsides

The implementation uses a bitmask of 32-bit unsigned integer words. A 1 bit indicates the number is in the set.

This leads to an obvious downside: memory use. Since we allocate one bit for each number up to the bound; allocating a BoundedSet with a bound of 2^30 (the largest sensible bound in JavaScript; remember JS only has Doubles)--will allocate a buffer 134MB in size.

It's also not actually faster for sufficiently large bounds. You should be safe up to at least 2^16 (65536). Somewhere above 2^14, iteration starts to get slow. But this probably depends on your hardware!